


However Improbable

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, M/M, Party, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22212805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Ed's bad luck is the unwanted gift that keeps on giving.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang, Roy Mustang/Original Character(s)
Comments: 117
Kudos: 1348
Collections: FMA Gift Exchange 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BellaEis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BellaEis/gifts).



> Hi, Bella! SURPRISE, I ended up pinch-hitting your gift for the exchange. :)
> 
> Less surprisingly, it got away from me, so there is definitely more of this to come soon, but I wanted to get the first part out for you! It's one of the usual Ed-keeps-alchemy-and-automail-and-stays-in-the-military AUs. c:
> 
> I tried to incorporate some Suffering™ per your request, but that's not always my forte, so I hope it's okay. XD Happy holidays!! ♥
> 
> The title is, of course, ganked from the seminal Sherlock Holmes quote:   
> "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

The instant that Ed opens the unnecessarily fancy envelope, reveals the unnecessarily fancy invitation, sees the title of the event, and thinks _He’d better not be there_ , he knows that he’s fucked. 

Elric luck is legendary. It hasn’t even been three weeks since Al ran out into the rain to save a kitten, scooped it up into a box, and then managed to slip and fall in such a way that the cat was completely unharmed, but Al fractured his tibia. He’s on crutches. Ed knows how utterly shit those are, but Al keeps saying that it’s fine, and everything is fine, and Ed shouldn’t worry about him, which makes it even more annoying, since he _knows_ Ed will anyway.

The point is, though, that Ed knows that Roy will be there, with a factual authority stronger than any premonition. Roy will be there because Ed doesn’t fucking want to see him. It’s that simple.

There are other reasons, too: they call the money-grubbing, shoulder-rubbing, glorified-begging parties _galas_ these days, but everybody at Central University who gets invited to the big, swanky mansions knows what they’re for. The second-worst part is that Ed’s department head threatened him with last pick of the lab assistants the most recent time that he tried to weasel his way out of attending one, because he’s “famous”—which means “lucrative”. The worst-worst part is that they need the money so bad that he literally can’t afford to fight it.

The worse-than-worst part is that a certain smarmy asshole of a general whose name Ed tries not to speak or even _think_ any more often than necessary has been one of the biggest champions for research funding on the governmental side, which extra-guarantees that he’ll show his stupid-gorgeous face.

Ed doesn’t want to see him.

Ed could honestly go the rest of his fucking life without seeing Roy again.

There had been a part of him, as a kid, that had known that this day would come—that he’d swear off Roy Mustang like somebody with a bad hangover swears off booze. But he’d always assumed that it would because of something dramatic, like a huge fight or a major betrayal. There were a few snarling battles back in the old days that had almost pushed him to it, but after that…

After that, it had gotten so much _better_.

And that was the problem.

Roy, without a plan, without an ulterior motive, without things to hide and condescension swimming under every other word, was… kind of… cool. Dorky-cool. Dorky-fun. Dorky- _nice_.

And just as hot as ever.

Ed had hoped fervently that he’d grow out of it. He’d kept his head down and his mouth shut as much as he could, but it was _hard_. Roy said shit that was funny, and he couldn’t laugh like he wanted to; Roy said shit that was cute, and he couldn’t smile. Sometimes, Roy said shit that sounded flirty, and…

But Roy was just like that. He always had been. Somewhere along the line, the playboy act and the person had blurred a little at the edges, and Roy just bantered on instinct. It wasn’t about _Ed_ ; it was about the game. It was about the challenge. It was about keeping up appearances, and keeping the team awake.

There had been a night, once—a Friday. Ed had stayed late to help sort out a big pile of maybe-damning evidence that they’d dug up from the records rooms, but Lieutenant Hawkeye had had to take Hayate to the vet, so it had just been the two of them sitting there, flipping through folders as the world darkened outside the window. After an hour or so of nothing but quietly sharing little observations and stacking promising materials in the center of the table, Roy had said, “Can I take you out to dinner?”, and Ed had instinctively said, “Sorry, promised Al I’d try the weird soup thing he’s been talking about all week,” and Roy had said, “Ah, of course, let me know how weird it is,” and they’d gotten back to work.

Ed had been in the middle of a bowl of weird soup when he’d comprehended the possibility that Roy Mustang had intended to ask him out on a date.

He’d dropped his spoon.

Al had thought that it was a reaction to the soup—which was, as promised, weird, but not bad-weird, in a way that defied ordinary language descriptors, which was a secondary accomplishment that Ed made sure to tell him about—but calming Al down had only taken a minute or two, which left Ed with an entire weekend to agonize about his revelation. He went back as far as he could remember and tried to reevaluate actions and choices and conversations through the lens of the _still_ _extremely unlikely_ potentiality of Roy being a fraction as attracted to him as he was to Roy.

He came up with nothing that was unequivocal, but one thing that was disconcerting: he and Havoc were in more or less comparable positions of singledom and similar states of blondness.

Roy didn’t ever seem to flirt with Havoc.

Roy _often_ seemed to flirt with him.

A lot of people thought that Ed was completely oblivious to social cues and so on and so forth, and that was true enough, but it wasn’t a matter of incomprehension; it was a matter of deliberately ignoring everything that Ed considered to be a waste of time. If he wanted to pay attention to something, it made no damn difference what the thing was. Data collection was data collection, and even subjective stuff like this could be catalogued one way or another.

So he spent the next two weeks watching carefully.

The first half of the first week proceeded mostly normally, although there was a slight change in the quality of Roy’s voice when he directed it towards Ed. That was certainly evidence of _something_ , but he didn’t have enough other information to draw any conclusions from it directly.

After that, though—

After that, Roy… withdrew.

It was subtle, especially at first. He just talked to Ed a little bit less, and joked less when he did, and didn’t make as many faces, and didn’t try to catch Ed’s eye across the room and raise a conspiratorial eyebrow and quirk a smile. He’d done an awful lot of that, before. The sudden absence of it put the prior frequency into stark relief.

But it was too late. It was _gone_.

The second week was more of the same, but a thousand times worse, because something in Ed—

Something in Ed had snapped in half, and the floodgates had flown open, and the feeling in him was a fucking cataclysm. It was a collapse. It was too big to deny and too powerful to kill and too toweringly real to hide from anymore.

He had rebuilt his life here after the Promised Day. He’d settled down and figured out this whole military thing, this whole grownup thing, this whole sedentary existence with all of its odd habits and annoying necessities. He’d created a new home for him and Al without having to lean on alchemy for anything except fixing up their crap apartment sometimes. He’d integrated himself into Mustang’s team in a completely new and different but weirdly decent sort of way. He’d made it _work_.

And in the process, he’d dedicated this newly-recovered, finally-free life that he’d made to Roy. To Roy’s passion, to Roy’s mission, to Roy’s _being_. To everything that Roy was, and everything he wanted to be.

That was—

Love. It was love in lots of forms, with lots of facets, but there weren’t any other words that could contain it. He’d fucked up and fallen in.

And now Roy was locking him out.

That had to mean that it _had_ been what he’d wondered—that had to mean that Roy had been flirting on purpose, or at least more-on-purpose than usual; and that he’d intended to ask Ed out to _dinner_ -dinner, and that Ed blowing him off in passing had read like a rejection, and—

And that was all wrong. That was backwards. That was shooting a pegasus out of the sky with a bazooka or some shit; that was like starting a pleasant dream and having to watch it devolve into a bloodbath.

Ed had had his share of those, and he didn’t want this to be one of them.

Even if he was wrong—even if he’d misread all the signs, which wasn’t unprecedented and wasn’t impossible—it was better to take the leap of faith and be fucking _sure_ about it. It was better to humiliate himself for five minutes than to throw it away for…

Well. For a lot longer than five minutes. For more years than he wanted to think about in the making, and for something like an off-chance of a future.

Two weeks after the night he’d messed it up, he made it halfway down the hall to leave Central Command before his heart got the better of him. He steeled himself. He doubled back. He pushed the door to the outer room open and crossed through and lifted his hand to knock on the door to Roy’s office, and—

“I’d like that very much,” Roy was saying, with that low hint of a purr in his voice that Ed hadn’t heard in a week and a half now. “Shall we say seven? I don’t want to rush you.”

Ed stood very still.

“Wonderful,” Roy said. “Shall I pick you up?”

Ed wanted to hit him for saying _shall_ twice in the span of twenty seconds, and also for going around breaking people’s fucking hearts all the time.

“I’d be delighted,” Roy said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

Ed lowered his hand, turned on his heel, and walked back out the door.

He spent that weekend thinking, too, which was a lot easier than feeling. Roy hadn’t done anything wrong. Roy had drawn a conclusion based off of his _own_ data, and the fact that his data was apparently rife with gaping holes and failed to account for things like _Ed being in fucking love with him, obviously_ was an unrelated issue. Roy was allowed to go out and date anyone he wanted. Roy hadn’t promised him anything.

But Ed hadn’t promised Roy anything, either—not really. Not in so many words. Not if the exchange for the unspoken ones would be ripping his own heart out of his chest every single damn day that he walked into his workplace.

People changed. It happened all the time. He could change, too, if he wanted.

He headed in slightly early on Monday, because he knew that Roy usually hid in the office and drank a lot of coffee to try to get a jump on the week.

Sure enough, this was one of those Mondays. Ed knocked on the doorframe, took one step past the threshold, shoved both the warm hand and the cold one into the pockets of his stupid uniform pants, and said, “I think I’m gonna look for a job at the university.”

Roy had just started reaching out for his coffee cup, and he went very, very still for a long second before folding both hands together on top of his desk blotter instead.

“They’ll be very lucky to have you,” he said. “Would you like me to put a word in?”

“Nah,” Ed said. He wanted to cling to the doorframe. He wanted to kick Roy’s desk over; he wanted to rip the papers scattered artfully all over it into tiny pieces. He wanted to tear the building apart. “I’d rather do it myself. Thanks, though.”

“Just let me know if there’s any way that I can help,” Roy said. He reached for his cup again. His hands were steady. “Have you had coffee yet?”

Ed had been offered a job running an alchemical research lab inside of a week. He’d basically just showed up at the university chancellor’s office and said “Hi, I’m the Fullmetal Alchemist, but I kind of want to stop doing that and work here instead,” and they more or less pried open a position for him. He knew it didn’t go like that for most people, but he was desperate, and desperation didn’t leave him a whole lot of room or time or energy for trying to make shit fair. Besides—the equivalent exchange for taking advantage of a situation like that had to involve an ass-kicking of epic proportions, so he knew he’d get his comeuppance.

He did, as it happened. It barely took another week.

He hadn’t counted on a gut-punch instead of an ass-kicking, though, and it _hurt_.

One of Roy Mustang’s many flaws was that he was polite even when it was pointless. Even though Ed had just unceremoniously job-dumped him after years upon years of camaraderie—some segments of it more comfortable than others—Roy had invited him and Al to the team’s pub night as though nothing had changed.

Al had said they had to go. Al had said it was the right thing to do. Al knew the contours of Ed’s objections, but not the specifics, because Ed hadn’t wanted to burden him with any more bullshit than strictly necessary, and Al had said that if they were going to burn this bridge, they had to do it _spectacularly_ , not by rudely refusing perfectly normal social invitations.

Ed had to admit that there was a weird and twisty kind of people-logic to that.

So they went.

And it took everything Ed had in him not to turn around and walk right the fuck back out when he spotted the team’s table off in the corner of the bar.

There was a very pretty brunette he’d never seen before sitting next to Roy. She was leaning against his arm just the slightest bit while she talked to Lieutenant Hawkeye, and she gestured with her hands a lot. She had a really nice smile.

Roy glanced at her in a way that was more-than-thoughtful—a way that was intent, and interested, and extremely fond. Like he was surprised and pleased and flattered that she was even there.

Then Roy spotted them and waved them over, and Ed bit his tongue and forced a grin and tried so fucking _hard_ to let it slide right off of him. Roy hadn’t done anything wrong. If anybody had fouled this up, it was him. It usually was.

The woman almost knocked her drink over leaning across the table to shake his hand warmly, and her eyes were a rich brown to match her hair, and she looked genuinely delighted.

“I’m Diane,” she said. “It’s amazing to meet you.”

“Ed,” he said. Keeping it monosyllabic was the smart bet in case he ended up with blood in his mouth. “It’s—”

“I know,” she said.

Then she flushed, covered her face with both hands, and momentarily removed one hand from her face to wave it helplessly. “Sorry! I’m sorry. That sounded super creepy. I’m sorry! I’m not a stalker—it’s just—you’re my nephew’s _hero_. Basically his favorite person on the planet. So I’m in the habit of checking all the newspapers for articles about you so that I can cut them out for him, which is…”

“How we met,” Roy said, grimacing.

Diane patted Roy’s arm. “It’s not your fault. Much as it’s a _really_ good action photo of Ed, they shouldn’t have cropped you out of it, since the article’s much more about policy than anything else, and it was a very obvious ploy to get people to pick up the paper.”

“Which worked,” Roy said. “This is Al.”

Diane stared at Al in awe and wonder and admiration, which made it all worse, because that was the best and most correct possible response to seeing Al.

“Oh, my gosh,” Diane said. “Alphonse Elric, you mean? Of course you are. But—sorry. It’s just that—you’re so much _shorter_ than I expected.”

Al turned to Ed with an expression that very clearly said _Entirely because I know you’re suffering, I’m going to give you this one for free_.

Laughing also made it worse.

Ed tried his sheer damnedest not to let anybody but Al figure out what a bad fucking night it was. At the end of it, as they were walking home with their shoulders close to try to share a little body heat, and also just because it felt sort of cozy, and Al was thoughtful like that, Al said, “So what do you think?”

Ed was slightly tempted to go back and forth with him a couple dozen times—to play dumb and feed him the lines, to say _About the potato wedges? You know how I feel about potatoes_ and make Al work for it.

But Al was…

Good to him.

The best to him.

And pretty much all he had left.

So he cut to the chase: “I think she’s really nice.”

“Hm,” Al said, which didn’t really say anything. “I thought so, too.”

They didn’t talk about it after that.

Ed started out scheduling experiments that he knew would run long on Saturday afternoons, and Al dutifully carried his mostly-sincere apologies to the pub. When the term changed, he founded an alchemy club—what the hell sort of hack university didn’t have an alchemy club to start with, anyway?—and set their meetings for Saturday nights. Students were busy, and it’d keep them out of the bars, too. It was a win for everyone.

In the year since then, Al has still gone to the pub nights here and there. He says everyone’s doing well, and mostly they look happy, even if they also look exhausted most of the time. The last time Al came back, he mentioned that Diane is still nice, but Al thinks everyone is nice, so it’s not entirely clear if he can be trusted.

Ed doesn’t want to know. Ignorance is purgatory, sure, but at least it beats the hell of certainty at a time like this.

He has half a mind to crumple up the cardstock in his hands and tell the department head to do his damned worst. Ed’ll just run all of the experiments himself. He doesn’t need help; he doesn’t need breaks. He doesn’t need a life.

Easy.

Except…

That it’s not.

Because other people rely on this research funding, too—a hell of a lot of them. Most people don’t have savings like he does; most people don’t have the luxury of quitting on the spot and picking up another job practically on the fly like he did. If he doesn’t do his part, some of the world’s best future alchemists might go hungry. And that’s not a risk he’s willing to take for the sake of his… whatever this is. Pride. Safety. Comfort. Blood pressure. All of the above.

Roy might not even be there. Maybe he’ll have a date. Maybe he’s getting married. Maybe he’s just got better shit to do.

It’ll be fine.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please forgive how long this took. I am all over the place right now, but I'm working on it! (A lot of the reason for that is Katsucon – if you're going, keep an eye out for me, and please say hello! ♥ I'm weird but nice. XD I'll toss a lineup post on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter if I make it that far. :x)
> 
> Please also forgive that I couldn't find a good place to split this, so it's just… like… most of the important stuff in one go. :'D It's 13K in total this bit, and then there's another segment that's a little shorter to finish it up, which I'm hoping to have edited soon.
> 
> Content warning in this one for anyone with emetophobia! It's pretty understated and finishes up fairly quickly, but let me know if you need more details. ♥

The night of the stupid gala finds them in Al’s bedroom. Al is sitting on the edge of his bed, crutches beside him, and swinging his one currently operable leg. Ed knows how much that sucks, although at least Al’s leg will reestablish its operability eventually. Ed is shit out of luck on that front, as is true for most of the fronts in his life.

“Wow,” Al says.

Ed grimaces and chances another look in the giant mirror. Ed personally went out and bought Al the nicest specimen in the store when he mentioned wanting a floor-length model, and then proceeded to carry it two miles back. Al has a body now, and he should get to look at it as much as he damn well wants, and Ed would be delighted to rearrange the teeth of anyone who disagrees. “That bad, huh?”

“Hush your mouth,” Al says. “You look so handsome. You’re a catch. You’d better watch your back at this party-thing.”

“It’s not a real party,” Ed says, since dealing with the rest of that would require informing Al in detail why he’s wrong, and Al would argue, and neither of them would budge, and it’d turn into a whole big thing. “It’s one of those stupid fake-ass ones where you’re just supposed to stand there and have meaningless conversations with people and pretend that you’re enjoying microscopic portions of mediocre food.”

“But then they give you money,” Al says.

“No,” Ed says. “Then they _say_ they’re gonna give you money, and if you’re lucky, they give it to the university, and maybe someday you’ll get to glimpse a teeny-tiny bit of it flying by in the distance on its way to become part of a building with their name on it or something.”

Al folds his hands in his lap and beams, the brat. “Maybe you’ll still have fun.”

“Yeah,” Ed says. He tries to tug on the tails on his coat. He hates this thing; _he hates his thing_. It’s like the worst and shiniest straight-jacket ever invented. “And then we can go ice-skating on the surface of hell.”

“No, we can’t,” Al says, perfectly calmly. “My leg’s definitely not up to it yet.”

“Shit, you’re right,” Ed says. “You sure you don’t want me to stay home and make s—”

“ _Yes_ ,” Al says. “Go do the dog and pony show.”

Ed grimaces so hard his jaw hurts. “There are so, so many other phrases that you could’ve picked.”

“Not really,” Al says. “C’mon.” He swings the crutches, hikes himself up— “Let’s go get your shoes on, or you’re going to be late.”

  


* * *

  


Ed catches a ride with Darci from the physics department and her wife, since apparently physics pays well enough that you can eventually get a car, but not well enough for you to skip the fundraising rigmarole altogether. The major upshot there is that it guarantees him twenty minutes of intelligent and interesting conversation during the drive up to a giant fuckoff mansion that’s even worse than Ed was fearing. They’ve upgraded since last year. Who could _live_ in a place like this?

He gets his answer very swiftly, because he recognizes the grandiosely-gesturing silhouette of Major Armstrong on the front steps before they’ve even pulled up to the stuffy-looking valet.

Ed honestly wouldn’t mind standing on the doorstep talking to Armstrong for the entire duration of this crap excuse for a social event, but since Darci’s the kind of person who’s on time to things, there are a bunch of other people in fancy-ass outfits showing up at the same moment that they do, which leaves Alex with a flood of people to greet. He does, of course, take the time to give Ed one bone-crushing, ribcage-squishing, organ-condensing hug, a boomingly sincere “ _How are you?_ ”, and a less-enjoyable pat on the head before ushering them inside.

That leaves Ed with a giant, giant, _giant_ foyer full of super-rich strangers, work colleagues at varying levels of acquaintance, and a handful of landmines who fall in between.

He spots the most explosive one instantly and thanks his stars for being so colossally un-lucky that at least they get the bullshit over with right off the bat.

“Thank you so much for the ride,” he says to Darci as fast as he can get the syllables out. “Gotta check out the—thing. Heard there’s a thing. Catch you later?”

It looks like she’s about to reply, but he can’t afford to give her a chance, because Roy is starting to turn towards their side of the room, which necessitates ducking behind an extraordinarily tall and broad-shouldered man for shelter and then edging towards the bar. Ed has to get through this, sure, but nobody ever said he has to do it sober.

An extremely lush potted fern eases his sneaking transition from the guy he was using as cover to a table with a chocolate fountain on it—briefly he considers filling a glass from that and sitting at the bar and drinking it instead of mixing booze and business, but he’s learned the hard way that people have very strange ideas about what constitutes ‘weirdness’. He darts onward from there, casting a glance back to confirm that Roy is still distracted talking to a guy that Ed might recognize from staff meetings. People are so damn hard to recognize when they’re all wearing the same stupid black and white.

Roy either actually likes schmoozing, or always manages to uphold an extremely convincing impression of someone who does, so he’s probably pretty distracted: Ed decides against requisitioning another potted plant and dragging it over towards the bar to use as an extra shield. At first, he determines that he simply doesn’t want to know why the Armstrongs have a bar in their foyer; but upon closer inspection, since all of the columns holding the thing up have little busts of Alex emerging from the marble, he thinks it might be a recent and mostly temporary installation, which makes somewhat more sense.

He sits down on the barstool closest to the wall, gingerly, trying to watch his back and his footing at the same time. He should have planned ahead for this and worn a hat or something. Next time he should dye his hair—it’s too late right now, probably, although it’s possible that he could make a pretty passable chemical dye if they have liquid soaps and a cleanser or two in the bathrooms, and there are all _kinds_ of artificial colorants in a lot of the drinks they’re probably serving here, which he could incorporate—

“Hi,” the bartender says, looking about as thrilled to be here as Ed feels. “Can I get you anything, or are you just hiding?”

Ed bites his tongue on what he wants to say, which is _Aw, shit_. “That obvious?”

“Well,” the guy says, “maybe not to everyone, but… this is my job, so…”

Ed also—narrowly—resists the urge to sigh. “Yeah. You got any recommendations for stuff that’ll help me survive?”

The guy half-smiles, starts to reach for a bottle, and then pauses. “Are you going to have to talk to people later?”

Damn it. “Uh… probably. Yeah.”

The guy makes a face, glances over the vast selection of gleaming glass again, and picks a different one. “We can ease you in.”

This is the most welcome that Ed has ever felt at one of these events that are purportedly for his own benefit. He’s going to put a good word in to Armstrong before he leaves; hopefully they can give this guy a giant tip or something. “Thanks. I mean it.”

“Sure thing,” the guy says. “Do you want it straight up, or should I put, like, syrup in it?”

Apparently Ed’s expression answers that question before he can get his mouth to help out, because the guy immediately reaches under the bar and pulls out something that says _CHERRY FLAVOR_ on the front.

“Damn,” Ed manages. “You’re the best.”

  


* * *

  


Al made him eat a real meal before he left, because Al is much less of a moron than Ed is in every conceivable way except for the ones that involve little fuzzy animals. As a result, for once in Ed’s measly excuse for a life, the first few sips of the drink actually serve the intended purpose of dulling the edge of his misanthropy and making it feel less horrible to get up and go wander over to a little cluster of science faculty that he sorta-knows.

“Hey, Elric,” Paul Paydren says upon noticing him first. “Maybe you can settle this.”

Ed displays yet more restraint by sipping at his drink instead of indulging the impulse to down the rest of it in one go. Of course he didn’t leave conflict-resolution behind with the shitty military. Of _course_.

“I can try, I guess,” he says.

“Perfect,” Paul says, because apparently he was tragically born without an ability to register enormous reluctance. “It’s about General Mustang.”

Ed closes his eyes for a second and tries very hard to cease existing.

Paul doesn’t register that, either. Ed wonders if Paul would register an earthquake. “You worked with him, right?”

Ed has to open his eyes before he looks like the weirdo in this situation, which contributes to the ongoing and ever-growing body of evidence that parties are bullshit. “Unfortunately for both of us… yeah.”

“Great,” Paul says.

Since facial expressions and tone of voice have had no effect, Ed tries just… staring at him. Openly. In horror.

“So,” Paul says, utterly undaunted. “The whole flame alchemy thing—he’s just a one-trick pony, right?”

Ed looks at him.

Paul appears to be completely serious.

Paul is a chemistry guy.

Paul is also, apparently, an _idiot_.

“There are a lot of things you can say about Mustang,” Ed says. “I’ve said a lot of them. I’ve said some of them really loudly in places I shouldn’t have and included words that I probably shouldn’t have said. But one thing he’s not is a slouch. Think about it. Do you know how many tricks go into that one trick? Do you understand what he’s actually _doing_?”

“He snaps his fingers,” Paul says, “and the array—”

“Nuh-uh,” Ed says. “First problem is that alchemy doesn’t perform itself. Second problem is that by the time he snaps, he’s already done all of the work.”

“Isn’t it molecular?” a slightly younger woman, who has been side-eyeing Paul with almost as much undisguised doubt as he deserves, asks next.

Ed nods, wanting to abandon his drink and shove his hands in his pockets. Does this godawful tuxedo-suit-thing even have pockets? He hates parties. He _hates_ them. He chugs some of the drink for good measure, and it barely tastes like cough syrup. “He does _massive_ amounts of calculations on the fly—and that’s after he has to estimate shit like humidity just based on… breathing, I guess. Misjudging the water concentration would completely mess him up, since what he’s doing is rearranging molecules to create flammable pathways towards _moving targets_. Snapping his fingers barely has a damn thing to do with it. He’s doing brilliant math on top of psychological predictions in a split-second, and the ridiculously intricate alchemy’s probably more or less simultaneous with that, and _then_ he snaps his fingers. It’s not the match that’s the hard part; it’s making and laying the whole damn fuse faster than you can blink. It’s fucking amazing, to be honest.”

Ed should know better than to be honest.

He’s reminded why when the eyes that have been fixed on him with fascination swing up and look just past his left ear, and a heavy hand lands on his shoulder.

“Why, Professor Elric,” Roy says, because of course he fucking does. “I had no idea that you think so highly of me.”

Ed’s heart beats hard in his throat, and he tries to shrug Roy’s hand off and side-step out from under it in a single mixed-up motion. “Bullshit you didn’t.”

“Well,” Roy says, very lightly, as he folds his hands behind his back in a way that somehow looks suave instead of stupid, “I suppose that you think of everyone _highly_ , in a manner of speaking.”

Ed feels heat rising in him everywhere—guts, chest, cheeks, throat. Pulsing, searing, too-bright; a flood of burning underneath his skin.

“And to think,” he says, “I wasn’t going to tell these future voters that you’re a total asshole, but now here we are.”

“Here we are,” Roy says contentedly. He holds his right hand out to the side-eyeing woman first. “Roy Mustang—I don’t believe we’ve met?”

Before shaking when it’s his turn, Paul gives Roy’s hand a glance that Ed thinks might be more disbelieving than mistrustful, but it seems like a bit of both. Ed supposes that that’s not an entirely irrational response to learning that a guy could incinerate you at a half-mile distance.

Roy makes a marginal amount of smooth small-talk before he touches Ed’s shoulder again. He needs to stop doing that. He needs to stop… everything, actually. He needs to stop with the amused eyes and the slicked-back hair and the perfect mouth and the warm hands and the posture and the languid grace and _all_ of it.

Ed has, not-so-incidentally, finished his drink. A waiter ghosted by and stole the glass out of his hand almost before he’d noticed that it was empty.

“May I borrow you?” Roy is saying, as if Ed has the remotest allegiance to this conversation past the fact that it originally didn’t involve having to be anywhere near Roy himself. “There are a few people I was speaking with earlier who mentioned that they’d love to meet you.”

Ed gives him a dark look, for all the good that it’ll do. “I’m not sure I trust anybody who enjoys talking to _you_.”

“If it helps,” Roy says, “I can’t be sure that they enjoyed it. It’s very likely that they were just being polite.”

The worst part is that Roy wouldn’t haul him away from one conversation and over to another if the second one wasn’t more important, which means that Ed would be an idiot to make a thing about it; and it’s not like he was having the time of his life putting up with Paul anyway. But conceding to Roy even over something very minor and very stupid rankles more now than it did towards the end of the military gig. It’s like time-warping right back to the beginning—to the not-so-good old days when Roy’s word was law, and Ed was trying to stage his own governmental coup at every single opportunity he got.

It’s fine. He’s better than that now—bigger than that. He’s a grownup. He can handle this shit.

“We’ll see,” he says, but he makes sure to intone it so that Roy will realize it’s an affirmative.

Sure enough, he earns an arched eyebrow and a bit of a smirk, and then Roy extends a hand in the direction of the other side of the room. Ed waves his goodbye to the group that he just tormented with his leftover childish hero-worship and tries not to be obvious about dragging his feet as he follows.

“I think they’re nearly ready to invest in the university in a very significant way,” Roy is saying, because of course he has to fill the silence, because of course he feels the awkward prickle of the electricity in the air between them just like Ed does. “All they need is a tiny touch of inspiration, and I know you’re the man for that job.”

Roy has a way of ducking and weaving between people effortlessly. Ed does not. Ed has to dodge a lot of elbows.

“Hey,” he says once he’s narrowly evaded getting a silk-sheathed joint directly in the ribs. “Why are you doing this?”

Roy almost-pauses and blinks at him over one shoulder. “Why am I doing what? Constantly interfering with university research?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.

“Because there are a lot of things in my life that I can’t fix,” Roy says. “And a lot that I can’t change, or undo, or redo, or revisit. Just this once, though, by putting the power that I have behind a career that perhaps I _could_ have had if I’d made better choices, I might be able to set a few things right in the world.”

“They’re not better choices,” Ed says. “They’re just different ones.”

Roy arches the eyebrow again.

Smooth fucker.

He never says anything that means anything when you want him to, and then in passing he always says too much.

“They’re very interested in your research,” Roy is saying now. “And they have a fair amount of scientific knowledge, so feel free to wow them with jargon all you like.”

“Nobody who actually understands what they’re doing needs to rely on specialized terminology to get the point across,” Ed says. “If you really _get_ it, you can make sure that anybody else in the world gets it, too.”

Roy is smiling at him sort of softly over the shoulder now, which Ed hates almost as much as Ed hates the fact that Roy still hasn’t crashed into anyone even though he refuses to look where he’s walking.

Ed bites his tongue—which is a skill that he has cultivated over the years, despising every minute of its utility—and tries to decide whether he should tell Roy to stop looking at him like that. Roy will say _Like what?_ , as if he could possibly not know what he’s doing when he calculates every breath that leaves his lungs four months in advance; and then Ed will have to sputter to try to find something to say that isn’t _Like you miss me_ , and Roy will have something light and clever and utterly humiliating to say in response, and it’ll just be a big fucking mess. Ed is tired of Roy’s fucking messes. That’s how they got here.

He’s still teetering on the brink of responding when Roy slows down slightly, and Ed notices two people looking directly at him.

First off, the idea that anyone could have Roy Mustang in their visual field and look at _Ed_ instead is, to put it delicately, completely whack.

Second, they’re dressed so finely—not fancier than anybody else here; not gaudily; but Ed has spent too much time with Al not to have learned a thing or two about fabric and whatever the fuck “style” is on accident—that he knows immediately that they’re _loaded_. This is, like, so-damn-fucking-rich-you-don’t-even-care-about-impressing-people kinds of money. This is serious shit.

Ed hates everything, without exception.

“This,” Roy says, “is George Latennio.”

“Oh, General,” the man, who’s slightly older with a graying beard, says calmly. “You’re much too kind. Dr. Elric, I presume?”

The dude extended his right hand. Ed bites his tongue again to try to prevent himself from cringing, and then he holds out the automail and hopes for the best.

“I don’t actually have a degree,” Ed says. The secondary kicker about the automail handshakes is that he can’t gauge the quality of other people’s at _all_ because of the lack of sensation. “Didn’t ever finish primary school, to be honest with you. It’s nice to meet you.”

Two truths and a lie. How about that?

George—is Ed even allowed to call him George when their social statuses are so drastically different?—releases Ed’s hand and doesn’t appear to be much worse for the wear, so Ed will just assume that the handshake thing went all right.

“Pleasure’s all mine,” George says. “This is my wife, Victoria.”

Ed’s not sure if he’s legally permitted to address her by her name, either, and he’s even less sure if he’s supposed to shake her hand or kiss the back of it or something, but he doesn’t have time to vacillate, because she’s reaching out towards him. It looks like her hand is at an angle perpendicular enough to the floor to indicate a handshake rather than any of the alternatives, but looks are especially deceiving in places like this. Which is another thing Ed hates.

“I am an enormous admirer of your work,” Victoria says. She doesn’t react at all to the automail, which might be a plus. “That last paper on the nuances of carbon density and distribution—”

Victoria actually presses a hand over her heart when she starts in on the details about Ed’s manuscript—which swiftly demonstrates to him both that she did her homework on him, unlike many of the people that he works with on a daily basis; and that she knows her shit, unlike people like Paul.

George watches fondly as she waxes very poetic about molecular mass, which is weirdly… cute? It’s definitely… something. Ed thinks he might like it, but he doesn’t want to pass judgment yet. He supposes it doesn’t matter too much, since she’s honestly pretty great to talk to.

Ed doesn’t actually know how long they go on like that, but at some point Rich-Guy George turns to Hot-Guy Roy and says, “Tell me, General—isn’t there already a state-supported alchemy program? You’ve put quite a lot of effort into this one considering that there’s already a system in place.”

“To put a very large discussion into a very small nutshell,” Roy says, doing the same terrible neutral-smile that he uses on the brass, “my experiences have led me to believe that a mutually beneficial relationship between academic alchemy and the government is most certainly _possible_ , but that the strictures of the State Alchemy program are likely to strangle out exactly the kinds of innovation and exploration that we need the most. It made me think that if we can support the best and most brilliant minds while keeping our meddling hands—and a series of checkpoints made by legislators, not scientists—well out of their workshops, we’re much more likely to see powerful results.”

There’s a masochistic part of Ed that almost misses hearing Roy translate his thoughts from regular speech into the language of politics all the time. He’s a master of it; that much is undeniable even to the untrained eye.

George looks very satisfied with that explanation, which just figures. Roy could charm water out of a stone and then sell the water to someone who lives near a river, and the stone to someone who owns a quarry.

The third time Roy makes one of the usual sweeping gestures with his left hand, Ed’s inner Winry—which he’s tried for years to excise, to no avail—reminds him to look.

No ring.

Ed’s not sure that that means much of anything, obviously, other than that Roy either hasn’t gotten married in the meantime, or _has_ but wasn’t willing to jeopardize his image by advertising it. When Ed thought about it—which he tried to do never, but ended up doing much more often than that—he always figured that Roy would probably invite him to something like that just as a matter of courtesy. They’ve been through a hell of a fucking lot together, and Ed ghosting like he did and adding a lightly-encoded _Good riddance_ under his signature on the resignation paperwork doesn’t erase that. Besides, even if Roy hadn’t been ready to chance a drunk ex-Fullmetal Alchemist at a celebration like that, he _definitely_ would’ve invited Al.

Before Ed can waste any more minutes of his life agonizing about it stupidly, another guy who looks too rich to be seen next to ordinary humans steps up near Roy’s left side, and Ed thinks that he’s probably the only one watching Roy close and carefully enough to notice the way Roy tenses.

“Georgie!” the new guy says, which is… awful, by pretty much every metric, actually. “How many years has it been?”

Something in George’s expression tells Ed that the answer is _Not enough_. “Felix. What a… surprise.”

Ed hopes he’s the only one watching Roy close and carefully enough to notice the fact that Roy has to bite back a laugh.

That’s… interesting. Usually Roy’s so damn cautious and so controlled that you could scrape at the surface of his face for clues for the rest of your life and never find so much as a hint as to what he’s really thinking.

He _does_ , however, like most people, eventually reach a threshold of critical mass in the stress department, past which he’s slightly fragile and sort of vulnerable and even more melodramatic. Ed saw a few glimpses of it over the years—especially the later years, when Roy trusted him more, and he gave up trying to paint himself like some kind of heroic pillar of stability instead of a guy just doing the best that he could at any given time.

The thing is—if Roy’s cracking _now_ , that must mean there’s something wrong. Maybe something _really_ wrong.

Ed doesn’t want to get involved. He really doesn’t.

But he knows he will anyway, because he doesn’t have it in him to stand by and let it get worse. Not on his watch.

George introduces them to this Felix guy, and it looks like Victoria is forcing a smile, too, and then George says, “I hate to delay you, General Mustang, Mr. Elric—I’m sure you have so many people to speak to. Why don’t we resume our conversation later in the evening, if we can?”

Roy says something suitably gracious that Ed barely even hears, because the dude just gave them an easy out when he could have held them hostage to keep them between himself and Felix. Apparently money doesn’t guarantee that people don’t have class after all. There’s a strong correlation, sure, but—

Roy is doing that shitty thing again where he reads Ed’s mind. Ed’s never been able to tell whether it’s accidental or deliberate.

“That was a lucky break,” Roy says as they attempt to keep their departing pace at more of a saunter than a desperate run. “I’m sorry if I put you on the spot. I thought you might like them.”

“You were right,” Ed says, and that’s still every bit as scratchy and unpleasant on its way up as it used to be. “Hey,” he says next, because circling the point instead of just stabbing it outright tends to end in a lot more escaping thoughts than anything else. “You seem kinda… off. Do you want to grab a drink or something?”

The naked gratitude in Roy’s eyes for a second throws him.

The small, almost-secretive little half-smile makes it worse.

“That sounds delightful,” Roy says. “I hope you’ll join me?”

If the bastard starts getting weepy about a lovers’ spat with darling Diane, Ed is going to have to pretend to know someone across the room and then sell that lie to one of the world’s best liars. He hopes it doesn’t come to that.

Roy graciously says hello to at least half a dozen people as they wend their way over towards the bar again. Ed should probably smile and wave at more of them than he does, but he’s gearing up for a hell of an experience, here, and he needs to save his strength and hoard his self-awareness. He’s going to have to play this one really damn close to the chest, especially since he was just dumb enough to promise to get a drink so that Roy’s not boozing it up alone, and Roy is the kind of person who will notice instantly if he just toys with it and sloshes it around to avoid actually drinking it.

In brief: he just trapped himself. Novice move. If he survives this night and makes it home again, he’s going to bang his head against the big, solid oak dresser that Al fell in love with at the antiques store until his idiot brain learns its idiot lesson.

The bartender that he made friends with earlier is, unfortunately, missing in action, and has been replaced by a guy who looks more interested in glowering sort of generally than in actually serving drinks. Maybe it’s a good thing; maybe the staffing change means that the contract these guys are on requires them to take paid breaks or something. Barkeep union. That’s nice.

Roy settles down on one of the stools as smoothly as ever, but Ed has spent enough time watching him over the years to know the signs—the subtle strain in his shoulders is a dead giveaway. He’s stressed. Something’s wrong. Something’s _very_ wrong.

Ed sits down a seat away, leaving one stool between them. His idiot brain _has_ learned its lesson where proximity to Roy is concerned. If he could get enough data—which he can’t, and won’t, because that’s too fucking dangerous even for his overdeveloped sense of adventure—the graph depicting the increasing intensity of Roy’s charisma as one moves closer to him would be fascinating.

The cranky bartender heads towards them. There’s a part of Ed that wants to ask where the other guy went, but that would be rude. Maybe this guy just has resting unfriendly face.

“What’ll it be?” the guy asks. He doesn’t sound delighted about the prospect of serving them, but Ed wouldn’t be either, so that’s fair.

“Any whiskey you have handy is fine with me,” Roy says. He smiles. He looks tired. “Thank you.”

Ed is not—is _not_ —going to step closer to that and peer down and inevitably go tumbling into the black hole and die.

Besides, the bartender is looking at him now, albeit unenthusiastically.

“If you’ve got a cider or something, that’d be awesome,” Ed says. “Thanks.”

Their politeness doesn’t appear to affect the guy’s mood much, but given how much Ed hates _attending_ these stupid galas, he can barely imagine what it’d be like to work at one. By and large, rich people give the shittiest tips. There’s a remarkable reverse income correlation, which would _also_ make a fascinating graph, although Ed would again need much more evidence than the anecdotal stuff he currently has, so—

Roy shifts around so that he’s facing the room, putting his back to the bar. He settles his elbows on it, leaning his weight on them, and casts another disinterested glance around the party. Somehow he looks like a brooding romance novel hero instead of like a dweeb—which is even more impressive given that he _is_ a dweeb, on such a fundamental level that it shouldn’t be suppressible.

“So,” Ed says. “Do you want me to ask, or do you want, like, companionable silence or something?”

Roy half-smiles again. It’s cute and sad and awful, and Ed would very much like that drink, please. Right now. Five minutes ago. And then another, and maybe a third. “That’s… very kind of you. I don’t want to bore you with my…” The pause is a bad sign. “…challenges.”

“You can say ‘problems’,” Ed says. “It’s just _me_ , Mustang.”

“There are several of each,” Roy says. He three-quarter-smiles this time, but it’s wryer than the first one somehow. “You have never been ‘just’ anything.”

If they’re already into the obnoxious semantics arguments, this is even worse than Ed thought. Maybe he can beg the cranky bartender for a white napkin to use as a flag of surrender, and if he waves it hard enough, someone might come to his rescue, and…

“You wouldn’t bore me,” Ed says. He has to say it, of course, but it also happens to be true. “For one thing, your stories about getting paper cuts turn into epic dramas, and for another… well. I dunno. Lots of things bore me, but other people’s feelings aren’t one of ’em.”

The smile is somehow getting progressively worse. Ed doesn’t understand this, doesn’t like it, and is starting to be moderately scared. Is Roy sick? Is he _dying_? Is he going to get fired? Is there something going on in Ishval? Is—

“None of it is very important,” Roy says, so at least that’s a relief. “Tell me how you’re doing—and how Al’s doing. Distract me instead.”

Ed makes sure to snort and say “Giving orders to civilians, now, huh?” before he gives a very, very quick summary of some of his research-related trials and tribulations, and then a less-quick summary of how much Al loves life and cats and furniture and having sensation in his fingertips. At some point, their drinks appear out of the ether, but neither of them moves to sip yet.

Ed wants to. His damn mouth is dry, which he suspects has less to do with talking than it does with who he’s talking to.

“So,” he says before Roy can ask him about Al’s rankings of the local felines and set him off on another ten-minute rant. “How is everybody?”

He partly means _How are you_ , partly means _How is Lieutenant Hawkeye_ , partly means _How are the guys_ , and slightly means _How’s Diane_. Packing four sub-inquiries into a single question like that weirdly makes him feel like Roy.

“Well,” the man himself says. “There’s… a lot going on, but everyone’s healthy, and I think they’re happy. With Falman, it’s sometimes hard to tell.” He pauses. “I shouldn’t say that—you can usually figure it out from the pace of his speaking voice. It’s slightly slower when he’s bothered about something.”

“Huh,” Ed says. “I always wondered. I sometimes got a… sense of it, with him, but I could never pinpoint exactly what it was that was cluing me in.”

Roy smiles, marginally more convincingly this time.

“So,” Ed says. Roy trained him to do a lot of things on purpose, and twice as many on accident. In the second category: refusing to succumb to distraction tactics. “How are _you_?”

Roy grimaces, probably both as a preliminary answer and in recognition that Ed just turned his own favorite table on him. “Kind of you to ask. I’m… fine. Everything’s… it’s really all right. Just—busy. You know how it goes. You know how it gets. There’s too much to think about. I always feel like I’m missing something, and it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass. Or stab me in the heart. Or both at once, although that might bend the laws of physics a bit, and I know how you feel about the laws of physics.”

“Grudgingly respectful,” Ed says. “Learned that lesson the hard way, courtesy of gravity and a couple other of my least-favorite friends.”

Roy arches an eyebrow. “And here I always naïvely assumed that you and physics were two peas in a pod. Are you closer with chemistry these days?”

“Guess so,” Ed says. He knows. He’s been procrastinating—circling around the thing, trying to gauge the shape of it, when he knows he just needs to dive in and start fighting regardless of the specifics. “How’s Diane?”

The wisp of amusement that had been flickering at the corners of Roy’s eyes disappears without a trace. Ed had tried to brace himself for that, but it still makes him want to grit his teeth and grip the edge of the bar counter.

“There are,” Roy says, delicately, “quite a number of other things that we could talk about.”

“I know,” Ed says. “But that’s the one you’re avoiding.”

Roy looks at him, and it’s _heavy_.

Then Roy picks up the glass that he’s been ignoring on the bar all this time, raises it, and takes a swig.

The instant the glass touches his lips, something tiny on the underside glows purple—barely visible past Roy’s mouth; barely noticeable in the brightness of the room—

Barely’s enough.

Ed’s left hand snaps out before he’s finished the thought—he grabs the glass and yanks it away from Roy’s face; he doesn’t, _doesn’t_ pay an iota of his damned attention to the way his fingers necessarily settled against and on top of Roy’s—

Roy blinks in surprise; a glance confirms that the bartender has conveniently vanished.

Ed doesn’t know how much time they have.

He pries the glass out of Roy’s grip, closes his right hand around the bastard’s wrist, jumps down off of his barstool, and starts dragging. The only upshot is that Roy trusts him enough to follow without an explanation, which might buy them a couple more seconds than they would’ve had otherwise.

Ed moves as fast as he dares; running would attract eyes, including possibly those of whoever put that array on Roy’s glass.

The instant they’ve made it into a side hall, before he’s managed to locate a bathroom, he asks the first question he’s afraid of the answer to: “Did you swallow anything?”

“A little,” Roy says. “What—”

Ed doesn’t slow down. Must be a bathroom here somewhere; must be something. Time for the second question he doesn’t want to ask: “How do you feel?”

Roy goes quiet for long enough that Ed glances back at him to make sure that he’s not shutting up for the first time in his life because he’s too woozy to string a sentence together.

The good news is that Roy is looking at him with that same old ferociously calculating perception. The bad news is that Roy is looking at him with that same old ferociously calculating perception, and there are half a dozen very valid reasons why Ed can’t grab him and kiss that stupid, sexy look off of his face right this goddamned second.

“There’s nothing out of the ordinary yet,” Roy says. “I didn’t get much. Probably not what someone would consider a normal dose—you were too fast for that.”

A compliment on the speed of one’s hands from the likes of Roy would ordinarily merit some celebration, but Ed still doesn’t know what they’re in for.

He spots a promising doorway with the door left invitingly open—a gleam of tile and white porcelain.

He slings their momentum into a turn and pulls them inside, shuts the door, sets the glass down on the incredibly impractical wicker towel shelf next to the fancy-ass sink—

He hasn’t even locked the door before Roy’s down on one knee in front of the toilet, jamming his fingers down his throat. For a second—just a _second_ —it looks like the worst proposal in human history.

Ed would like his brain removed and replaced with a model that doesn’t think things like that, _ever_. Every single part of it is crap.

He tries to examine the array while Roy makes very discontented vomiting noises, but the thing was etched onto the glass so shallowly and so small that he can hardly differentiate the lines. He sniffs the whiskey for good measure, but it smells no shittier than regular whiskey, as far as he can tell. He’s not much of a whiskey expert. The shittiness has a lot to do with that.

He looks at Roy, who has taken a break and started looking slightly pale. Ed holds his breath for a second and tries to make himself appear much less unsettled than he feels.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Peachy,” Roy says shakily. Naturally, Ed managed to pick out the single most claustrophobic restroom in a mansion the size of three houses back home: Roy sits down on the floor, leans back against the wall, starts to extend his legs, and then stops when he realizes his feet will collide with Ed’s in another second. He nods to the glass in Ed’s hands. “Anything definitive?”

At least if he’s still talking like that, it hasn’t damaged too much yet.

“I don’t know,” Ed says. Peering at the glass some more absolutely beats looking at Roy sprawled there artfully, rumpled and mussed and weary-looking with sweat smeared across his forehead. “Based on the activation when your mouth touched it, I’d… guess… that it’s… maybe it imbued the liquid with properties or something? This…” He glances around for other light switches, but of course there’s only a dull, yellowish, ambience-making sconce available in a _bathroom_. Why the hell would you want to be able to see what you’re doing in a place like this, right? He leans in towards the useless fucking sconce and tries to adjust the shade a little, and then he very carefully sets his fingertip behind the array in the hopes of creating contrast. “I think… there’s something in here about… essence? Or maybe—truth?”

“Hm,” Roy says. Good to know that he hasn’t lost his knack for being incomparably helpful.

“Maybe we can go from the other direction,” Ed says. “Is there anybody who’s out to get you?”

Roy smiles with a combination of serenity and sarcasm that wounds Ed’s very soul. “I’m assuming you would like the list that’s in order of priority, rather than the one that’s alphabetical.”

Ed scowls at him for old times’ sake and then squints at the infuriatingly minute array on the glass some more.

“Thought,” Roy says.

“Did it bring a friend?” Ed says.

Roy gives him an extremely familiar _Yes, very funny_ look before saying, “Ask me something.”

Maybe this damned array has done some damage after all. “What?”

“Ask me something,” Roy says, “that I would ordinarily answer with a lie.”

Ed can feel his eyes narrowing. “I—it—fine. Okay. Um—when was the last time that you did something stupid?”

“About five minutes ago,” Roy says, “when I was watching you instead of my drink.”

A pause ensues, which they spend staring at each other. Ed tries to swallow and doesn’t have much luck.

“Ah,” Roy says, sounding slightly unstable. “That’s… interesting. I had every intention of telling you that I’ve never done anything stupid in my life.”

“Obviously,” Ed says.

“Obviously,” Roy says.

This already tiny bathroom somehow feels even smaller all of a sudden. Fancy that.

“Are you sure?” Ed says. “Did you _try_ to say the other thing, or were you just thinking it?”

“I made a sincere effort to make those words come from my mouth,” Roy says. He holds a hand up like he’s swearing in or something. “Scout’s honor.”

What an asshole. Ed’s heart pounds, which is a nice reminder of _one_ other thing that he can think about.

“How are you feeling now?” he asks.

“A touch lightheaded,” Roy says, “but that could be the vomiting on its own.” He raises his right hand and presses two fingers to his carotid artery under his jaw, gazing gorgeously into the middle distance for a few seconds. “Heart rate is normal.”

“Okay,” Ed says, despite all signs vigorously indicating that absolutely nothing is okay. “That’s—good. At least. But we can’t count on that; we should get you the fuck out of here and to a doctor or something. Even if there’s nothing in the array itself that interacts badly with the whiskey, I’ve got no idea how mind-altering alchemy’s gonna affect you in the long run, and—”

“Breathe,” Roy says. “We have time.”

“We do _not_ ,” Ed says. “We don’t know that, and we can’t rely on it, and why the fuck are you so calm about this, anyway? You’re so _weird_.”

Roy smiles. It’s awful.

“I missed you,” he says, which is a _thousand_ times worse.

“Shut up,” Ed says. “Delirium is a bad sign, by the way. Can we get you out of here? Obviously that’s what they’d expect, and they’d probably be waiting, since they must’ve noticed that we skedaddled from the bar, and they’re probably looking for us, and catching you off-guard in this state is _exactly_ what they want, but… You think the Armstrongs have got a back door? Paranoid rich people always have a back door, don’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Roy says. “I am a paranoid middle-class people.”

Ed holds his left hand over his eyes for a second and tries very hard to pretend that this isn’t happening. He’s still wearing the annoying, too-structured, super uncomfortable tux-suit nonsense number, though, which makes it extremely difficult to sustain that fantasy for long. “I told you to shut up.”

“While we’re waiting,” Roy says, “you… _do_ realize that you could ask me anything you want and get the real answer, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Ed says, lowering his hand again so that his glare will have more impact. “But I don’t want to know anything that you wouldn’t tell me of your own volition. So _shut up_.”

Evidently Roy has an endless supply of terrible smiles stored away somewhere, but they’re all due to expire soon, so he’s pulling out every single one to wear tonight.

“You’re a better man than I am,” Roy says.

“Bullshit,” Ed says. “Principles are a privilege. The life you’ve got whittled yours down to the bare minimum, but you cling to ’em with everything you’ve got. I’ve just been luckier that way. It’s nothing to do with being ‘better’.”

“It’s not a roulette game, Ed,” Roy says, weirdly softly. Maybe he’s feeling weak now. Maybe they should rush him the hell out of here, and Ed can just mow down anybody who dares to get in the way, and— “You have fought tooth and nail to be who you are, even when it’s hurt you.”

Ed manages to swallow down _You mean like now?_

“Whatever,” he says. “We can do amateur philosophy later when you’re not teetering on the edge of peril, here. What do you think? Back door? I feel like this place is old enough that they might have, like, a servants’ entrance or something—didn’t that used to be a thing?”

Roy tilts his head, drawing one knee halfway up and resting his forearm on it. He looks like an advertisement. He should have a cigarette in one of those stupid opera-length holders. And maybe a little more color in his face. “You asked about Diane.”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “Before you got fucking alchemy-poisoned, back when I was trying to figure out what was _regular_ -wrong with you.”

Roy is watching him too closely. All of Ed’s attempts to melt into the floor tiles or phase through the door have been unsuccessful. There is not enough space in this room.

“I believe she’s doing well,” Roy says measuredly, “but I don’t know for sure, because we aren’t together anymore.”

Ed keeps his face painstakingly still. He doesn’t even know what he feels, so the last damn thing he wants to do is let some muddle of mixed-up bullshit into his expression. Is he relieved? Is he excited? Is he curious? Is he sort of sad? Is he ready to go home and bury his head under the covers and beg Al for some of that weird herbal tea stuff that’s supposed to make you feel at peace with the world?

He knows the answer to one of those, at least.

“Oh,” he says. That’s a start. It’s not much of a start, but interjections have to count for something. “I’m sorry.”

Roy keeps watching him, the bastard.

“What?” Ed says. “She seemed really nice. And you liked her. So I’m sorry to hear it didn’t work out. Did this just happen recently, or what?”

“A little over a month ago,” Roy says. “It…” He adjusts the position of his legs and manages to come up with something else that’s every bit as effortlessly attractive. Nobody should look that good sitting on the floor next to a toilet— _no one_. It’s a fucking crime. “She wanted… a family. And to travel. And my full attention, at least sometimes. At least enough for me to keep my promises. All of those are perfectly reasonable things to ask for, but they’re… they aren’t things that I can give.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, because he doesn’t know how else he could even try to approach it. “It’s… when you’ve got something you built your life around like that, it’s… hard to let people in. And then if you do, it’s hard for them to understand.”

Roy looks at him, once again with a truly unreasonable amount of significance.

“ _What_?” Ed says.

Roy tilts his head the other direction. He looks like a puppy, except that puppies don’t usually deliberately drive Ed to the brink of violence. “You didn’t bring a plus-one.”

Ed rolls his eyes. “Yeah, well, you know the drill—Al’s not up to it, and I hate everybody else. I come to these things to help the university get money, not to have fun.” He glares some more, not that the previous glaring has helped at all. “And not to take care of your dumb ass, but here we are.”

“Here we are,” Roy says.

Ed leans back against the door, trying to think fast enough to outpace his own panic. “Okay, what if—I could just go out there by myself, and you could lock yourself in, and I could call Lieutenant Hawkeye to come pick us up. She could bust into the place and rescue us. Or I could go find Major Armstrong and have _him_ help us find the best emergency exit. Or—”

“Ed,” Roy says. “I’m fine.”

“Like hell you are,” Ed says. “Probably it’s some kind of slow-acting poison that starts by disintegrating the parts of your brain normally responsible for generative creativity, which prevents you from lying, and then it starts eating the rest of your cranial matter until you lose motor function and then stop breathing and then—”

“Ed,” Roy says again, every bit as calmly as the first time. “Can I ask you a question?”

“What do you mean, _can_ you?” Ed says. “Anybody who’s ever tried to stop you from talking when you wanted to vastly underestimated how much you love the sound of your own voice.”

Roy smiles thinly. “Is that a ‘maybe’?”

“Lemme think,” Ed says. “If you ask me something I don’t like, my choices are to ignore you—which you and I both know I’m _real_ good at—or to run screaming down the hall, which’ll let me implement the part of the plan where I do the smart thing and go get Major Armstrong. So talk.”

Roy watches him for another second. Roy isn’t smiling anymore.

Roy swallows. And then he says, “Why did you leave?”

Roy is still monitoring him way too close, way too intently, and with an edge of… wariness. Like he’s bracing himself. Like he’s expecting Ed to say something like _Yeah, well, I’m older now, and smarter, and I realized that you’re eventually going to fail. Didn’t want to get stuck on the losing side_.

“I just needed a change,” Ed says, despite the fact that the words feel so wooden that his whole mouth tastes like sawdust. “I’d been doing that gig with you my whole life, basically. Never tried anything else. And I figured this was a pretty decent way to… y’know. Spread some of the stuff that I know about alchemy around. Make sure kids understand that there are consequences to it. Be useful. I wasn’t… I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot left to offer to you or the military anymore.”

The unmitigated pain that flashes across Roy’s expression takes him by surprise. It then stabs him directly through the center of the chest, right between the ribs, also by surprise.

“That’s not true,” Roy says. “I think you know that. I think you knew that at the time.”

Ed gets stupid when he’s scared. “What do you want me to say?”

Roy runs a hand through his hair, which is so unjust that they should just lock him up in prison until this truth-poison thing wears off. “I don’t know. It—I guess it doesn’t matter. It was your choice, and I respect that—at least, I try to respect that. I just… can’t help wondering if it was… personal, and the prospect keeps me awake at night sometimes. I would never want to…” He shutters up like a manor house readying for a hurricane. “I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t suppose I want the truth from you in any case, if the truth is that it’s my fault. I’m a bit of a coward that way.”

“Well, it’s not,” Ed says before he can clamp his minefield of a mouth shut.

Roy’s expression doesn’t change. “It is characteristically kind of you to say that, but—”

“It’s _not_ ,” Ed says. “I wouldn’t bullshit you just for fun, Mustang; that’s your game. It’s—”

No time like the present to fuck himself over completely, right? Maybe if he does it thoroughly enough, Roy will just never want to see him again, and they won’t have to end up in sticky spots like this.

“You—” he attempts. “ _Fine_. Okay? Fine. I realized I’d fucked it up with you after you asked about dinner, but by the time I had worked up the data to be sure and then the guts to go talk to you about it, you had a new girlfriend already, because you can have fucking _anyone_ , and you know it. And I just didn’t fucking figure I had it in me to come to work every single day with you all… with you acting different, and dating somebody else, and I knew I’d have to listen to Havoc give you the third degree, and I figured—fuck it. Neither of us was gonna benefit from that, and it was time to cut my fucking losses and move on and go somewhere else. This seemed like a good enough place to run to.”

Roy is staring at him, which isn’t really any surprise.

“Not _here_ ,” Ed says. “Definitely not this specific… figuratively. You know what I mean.”

Roy continues to stare at him.

“ _What_?” Ed says. “You asked for the goddamn answer, and you got it. Are you happy now? What’s that look for?”

“I thought—” The way Roy’s throat moves when he swallows makes Ed’s mouth water. “Or… I assumed, I suppose I should say, that it was… because of me. Because of what I asked you. That that made you feel unsafe.”

Ed presses the heels of both hands in against his eyes for a second. If he pushes hard enough with the right, maybe he can do enough damage to knock himself out, and then he won’t have to finish this conversation. “Well, that makes you the second-stupidest person in this room.”

Roy manages something in the neighborhood of a laugh, although it has a fair bit of wheeze in it, too. “I don’t think that’s the right word for it.”

“That’s because you’re a politician,” Ed says. “I call it like I see it, and we’re _stupid_.”

“Ed,” Roy says, so warmly that it makes Ed’s insides curl, that it makes his fingers clench, that it makes his heart squeeze, “am I correct in guessing that you’ve been silently tearing yourself up about this for the better part of a year?”

That makes Ed’s heart pound instead—hard, fast, and violent. That sounds like—what? An accusation of weakness? A sharp-edged observation far, far too close to the meat of the truth?

He’s grown up, sure, but he hasn’t grown out of some things. The visceral vitriol when Roy Mustang sees right through him and _tells_ him so still makes him seethe before he can wrangle himself back under control.

“Get fucked,” he says, lowering his hands and forcing them to be still. “It’s none of your damn business what I think about anymore, remember? Never has been, actually, but I guess that never stopped you.”

Roy has, very subtly, taken up searching Ed’s face, like some neon letters are going to spell out Ed’s motivations on it any second now. “Forgive me if I take that as a yes. Should I…” He pauses, runs his tongue over his lips; Ed has also not managed to shake a worse old habit still—perversely, Roy always somehow seems even hotter when Ed is _pissed_ at him. “Should I ask again?”

If Ed’s heart beats any more intensely, he’s going to bruise his own ribs from the inside, and then he’s going to have to drag _both_ of them to the hospital after all this. “Ask fucking wh—”

“May I take you out to dinner?” Roy says.

It is very likely that the reason that this particular bout of searing rage has flared so high is that it’s underscored with a very tall, very flammable foundation of pent-up hurt.

Fuck it.

“Are you for real?” Ed asks. He fights to keep his voice from rising; alerting the fuckers who caused this to their location sounds like the only possible way to make it worse. “I’m not going to be your fucking rebound!”

“Ed,” Roy says, and it’s only the authenticity of the emotion flickering under his expression that stops Ed from saying more, “you’re not. You wouldn’t be; of course you— _Diane_ was the rebound, which… Don’t think I would dream that that’s forgivable, but—”

Ed doesn’t think his head is properly attached to his spinal column. Is there any chance that that’s Winry’s fault? She bangs him around a lot when she’s making adjustments. “What the hell could she have been a rebound f—”

“From _you_ ,” Roy says. “It—I mean, it fell into my lap, but I wouldn’t have leapt for it if it hadn’t been… if _you_ hadn’t been…”

Ed doesn’t know what word Roy’s searching for— _unavailable_ , _uninterested_ , _unsuited_ , _unlikely_ —but it doesn’t matter much.

“I was trying to get over it,” Roy says. “Over _you_. It—I knew that—anything between the two of us wouldn’t have been… appropriate—”

Ed’s brain spins so fast that it flings words every which way. A few of them make it to his mouth, and then they jump, even though they had so much to live for: “When the hell have we _ever_ been ‘appropriate’?”

“I don’t know,” Roy says. He tries to smile, but his voice sounds—ragged. Wrecked. “Surely we must have stumbled into appropriateness once or twice. As an accident.”

Ed can feel the adrenaline seeping right back out of him, because epinephrine is a rat bastard traitor. “Is that what stopped you? Fucking _propriety_? I’ve heard a lot of shit excuses out of you, but—”

“No, Ed,” Roy says. He leans his head back against the wall; Ed can’t see his eyes. “I let it go. I hadn’t ever been sure, and your response made me think I’d been very, very wrong, and the last thing I wanted to do was to violate your boundaries when you’d had so precious few of them in the course of your life. I didn’t want to influence you. And I didn’t want to affect… anything. The life you have; the job you were doing—I didn’t want you to think that you had to go along with it. I didn’t want you to think that I was going to hold it over you. I didn’t want you to think that anything was going to change. It felt like a stroke of luck, after the fact, once I was… once I stopped… once I got a hold of myself. I’d gotten my answer, and nothing had been lost.” He looks up again. “Two weeks later, you walked up to my desk and quit, and the only conclusion I could draw from it was that all of those things had happened after all. I’d done it, and I’d done that to you. And the only thing that you thought was left to you was to run away from something that you had built, and that you _enjoyed_ , before I could torment you any worse.”

“I take back what I said earlier,” Ed manages, in spite of the way his voice tries to shake. “You’re the stupidest person in this room.”

“One does one’s best,” Roy says.

“You’re a fucking maestro,” Ed says.

“Thank you,” Roy says. “May I ask you something else?”

 _May_ is different from _can_.

“No,” Ed says. “I’m revoking your speaking license. You have to earn it back with good behavior. And by shutting up until further notice.”

Roy wrinkles his nose. “Is this some sort of a new regulatory system? Please don’t tell me I’m going to have to overthrow the government _again_.”

“You know what’s killing me?” Ed says.

“My irresistible combination of effortless suavity and dashing good looks,” Roy says.

“Fuck you,” Ed says. “It’s the fact that this… truth-telling array doesn’t seem to have any effect on sarcasm.” He picks up the glass again, trying to squint harder this time. “Did they work that in? How could you? That’s so fucking subtle. It’s _genius_. Who made this? Who do you know who wants to get secret confessions out of you who has access to a seriously brilliant alchemist?”

“I’m not sure,” Roy says cheerfully, “but I do know how I’ll be spending my Sunday.”

Ed eyes him. “You mean going to jail for speaking without a license?”

“Why, _officer_ ,” Roy says, batting his eyelashes. “Are you going to handcuff me?”

“I’m gonna cuff you, all right,” Ed says. “But it’ll be around the goddamn head.”

“That’s fair,” Roy says.

Ed eyes him. “Try telling me another lie. This shit could be wearing off. Might be safe to get you out of here.”

“The fact that Hayate disdains all of my attempts at affection actually bothers me,” Roy says. He pauses, and then he says, “Damn.”

“It’s okay,” Ed says. “I always figured. The way you’d sulk after he ignored you was different from when you were just sulking for fun.”

Roy holds a hand over his chest. “I beg your pardon—I do not _s_ …” He blinks rapidly, opens his mouth, shuts it, and then winces. “Yes, it is definitely still in effect.”

Ed wants to laugh with him about that particular unintentional confession, but the fact is that they’re still trapped in a tiny bathroom with all of the things they both just said.

“You need to get your own dog,” Ed says. “And spoil it rotten so that it likes you the best.”

A touch of slyness worms its way back into Roy’s smile, and Ed’s spine tightens. “Might that strategy work on others, do you suppose?”

“Keep dreaming,” Ed says. “Maybe you can dream up some new lines.”

Roy mimes being stabbed repeatedly in the heart. Ed wants to kick him. At least they’re back on familiar ground.

“Relative levels of spoiledness aside,” Roy says, casually, as if that’s even a word, which Ed is ninety percent sure it’s not, “how are you?”

“I told you,” Ed says. “I’m fine. Al—”

“I didn’t ask about Al,” Roy says. “I would be delighted to later, but right now I’m asking about _you_.”

Ed eyes him. Despite the rather wishy-washy parameters of this array as far as exaggeration go, it’s pretty likely that Roy genuinely means that he’d be delighted to talk about Al. “Thanks or whatever. Like I said—”

“I’m not interested in what you tell other people when you’re being polite,” Roy says. He props an elbow up on his knee and leans his head on his hand and smiles, and Ed hates him, hates this, hates the universe almost as much as it hates him back. “I want to know if the shower doesn’t run hot enough at your apartment, or there’s a creaky step on the staircase in the building where you work that always catches you by surprise, or if there’s never enough graph paper in the staff room. Or if the chalkboards don’t erase right, or if a colossally stupid article came out in the newspaper the other day that drastically misrepresents an important scientific fact. I want to know what the best coffee place is near campus, and if you’re allowed to have any input on naming Al’s cats, and if you have a favorite jacket. I want to know the boring stuff. I want to know what the little things are that annoy the hell out of you, and what other little things make the day better sometimes.” He shifts, rolls his shoulders, half-shrugs— “And the rest of it, too. Whether you _like_ it. Whether the imminence of twenty feels triumphant or daunting, or maybe both at once. Whether the automail still beats every weathervane. Whether you’ve been back home lately. What that’s like. What it’s all like. What you think about when you can’t sleep. What you’d wish for if you were ever selfish enough to pick something for yourself.”

This is the Roy Ed knows—or the one that he used to know. The one from the late nights in the office, the late nights after the pub, the early mornings and the caffeination races and the occasional lunches out.

This is the Roy Ed fell in love with.

What a pain in the _ass_.

“Right now,” Ed says, “I’d wish for you to suddenly develop the physical capacity to stop talking for more than a minute at a stretch.”

He hesitates.

And then he caves, because he always does. He always has. It’s _Roy_.

“The job’s fine,” he says. “I told you—keeps me busy, mostly interesting, trying something new. I like learning about stuff. The academic politics are stupid as _fuck_ , but I think enough people have noticed that I will start throwing rocks at windows if they try to back me into corners with that bullshit that they’re mostly leaving me alone. The students are mostly good. Some of them are great, and some of them are going to get themselves into a shitload of trouble with their entitlement complexes one of these days, but they average out okay. It pays the bills. The automail is still an asshole, and I’m almost completely desensitized to the maximum dosage of regular painkillers, which I’m kind of worried about. I haven’t told Al about it, ’cause he’d freak. I haven’t even told Winry. Hope you feel special.” He pushes his hair out of his face. His heart keeps hammering in his ears. “What else were you going on about? I am not allowed to name animals, now or ever. Al made a permit for himself and laminated it and refuses to make me one. The chalkboards are iffy. Of course I have a favorite jacket. This isn’t it. I—”

A gentle knock at the door makes him startle so hard that he almost sheds his skin. The banging of his heart immediately gives way to a frantic skittering.

A second knock is followed by the single loudest whisper he has ever heard in his life:

“Edward? It’s me—Alex Louis A—”

Ed opens the door. 

“Whatever this looks like,” he says, “that’s not it. And he’s probably going to be okay. Maybe.”

“You are a beacon of hope,” Roy says. “Good evening, Alex. I hope we didn’t ruin the party.”

“Certainly not!” Armstrong says. It’s apparent that he didn’t believe Ed’s extremely convincing explanation of the situation, though, because he’s looking between the two of them with a significant quantity of poorly-masked suspicion. “I just heard through the grapevine—and by that I mean that I had to ask half a dozen individuals if they’d seen you—that the two of you had disappeared off into a hallway some time ago! I thought it wise to investigate to make sure that the two of you weren’t…”

Ed stares in disbelief at the gentle giant that he had previously considered a mentor and a dear friend, who is now trying to avoid saying the words _fucking like rabbits in some corner of my house_. It’s like the universe just slammed a giant CONFIRMED stamp down on Ed’s petition to hate every single last thing that exists.

The pause lasts long enough that Ed’s almost ready to say it just so that they can all die of shame and move on, but instants before he cracks, Roy clears his throat.

“Alex,” Roy says. “Does this house have a side exit that we might be able to use, by any chance?”

“I need a plastic bag and a sealable container that you don’t want back,” Ed says.

Armstrong stares at each of them in turn, which Ed supposes is fair.

Ed holds up the glass. “This is evidence. And there’s gonna be _hell_ to pay. Oh, hey—that sorta angry-looking bartender who replaced the first one? He was a plant. He’s probably fifty miles away by now, but if you got a good look at him—”

“The plot thickens,” Armstrong says. “Remarkable! I didn’t even realize there was a plot, and now we have one that is quite coagulated.” He straightens up, which makes Ed realize that he was leaning down while they were having that conversation, which makes Ed hate everything a minuscule but measurable bit more. “I will return with the items you requested, and then we can convey General Mustang outdoors and ensure that he makes it home safely.” He pauses. “General, do you have any objections to me carrying you, or shall I look for a wheelbarrow?”

Roy loses another shade of color. “That—really won’t be necessary; I’m… sure I can… muster—”

“You’re definitely gonna have to carry him,” Ed says. “We have no idea how bad it is, and the wheelbarrow’s way too obvious if whoever tried to get him is still hanging around. Just can’t risk it.”

“Very good,” Armstrong says, and then he ghosts off with that always-surprising deftness, and Ed shuts the door again.

“You absolute _brat_ ,” Roy says.

“Hey, look,” Ed says. “A talking sack of potatoes.”

Roy slouches against the wall and works his way up to a very, very impressive pout.

  


* * *

  


Armstrong conscripts a driver named Michaelson—whom he produced seemingly out of thin air, but Ed thinks maybe that’s one of those secret powers known only to rich people—to spirit them away without anyone the wiser. A part of Ed wishes that he wasn’t too damn old and too damn tired to find this part vaguely exciting; there ought to be something sort of thrilling about sneaking out the back of a mansion and getting whisked away through the night with someone that you…

Well. Whatever.

When Michaelson pulls up to the curb in front of the house, Knox is sitting on the front porch smoking. He’s just too far away for Ed to be able to see him very well until they’ve paid and tipped the cabbie and stepped out of the car, at which point they’re still too far for Ed to hear the deep sigh, but he can absolutely see it.

Knox is stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray as they come up the front steps. “You _knew_ I was about to go to bed, didn’t you?”

There’s a sheepish tilt to Roy’s shoulders. “I had… wondered. I’m sorry.”

“Like hell you are,” Knox says. “You know how many doctors there are in this city?”

“That I trust?” Roy says, beaming. “Just the one.”

Without even breaking eye contact, Knox crushes the cigarette hard enough that ash puffs up around the end. “I think you think that I like you more than I do.”

“Very likely,” Roy says. “You do have to admit that I bring most of your most interesting cases.”

“‘Interesting’ doesn’t pay the bills,” Knox says, “or let the missus get to sleep.” He stands, winces, puts a hand to his lower back, and starts towards the door. “What did you do this time?”

Roy holds the door to Knox’s own house for him, because of course Roy does. “Would you believe me if I said it wasn’t my fault?”

“No,” Knox says, kicking his shoes off just inside the door. “Hon, I got a reverse house call. Don’t panic.”

“We’re terribly sorry,” Roy says as Ed tries not to peer around like a curious child. That’s so rude that his mom would probably disown him from the afterlife, but he likes seeing how other people decorate—what lampshades they choose, what furniture they keep, what photographs they put on the walls. “I know it’s a tremendous inconvenience to drop in so late,” Roy goes on. “We really can’t apologize enough.”

The woman who emerges from what looks like the kitchen stops with one foot into the front room and stares at them.

“Aren’t you General Mustang?” she says.

Roy’s face goes completely neutral but for an unobtrusive layer of warmth. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good _gracious_ ,” Mrs. Knox says. “General Mustang in my _home_? Please forgive the mess; I’m so sorry—if I’d have known—may I get you anything?”

“No, no, no,” Roy says. “You’re much too kind. Please don’t trouble yourself on our account. We’re the ones imposing on you and your husband; we couldn’t possibly—”

“Sit down,” Knox says, pointing at the couch, “and tell me what you fouled up this time.”

“We went to the charity gala,” Roy says, settling gingerly and folding his hands on his knees.

“There’s your first mistake,” Knox says. He opens a cabinet along the wall and extracts a leather medical bag. Ed can’t help wondering how many of those he has stashed around the house.

“It was an array,” Ed says. He holds up the bag with the glass on it, and then the oddly-shaped glass bottle that Armstrong turned up for the rest of the whiskey. “Activated when he put his mouth on the glass, but we don’t know if it affected the liquid, too, so…”

Knox squints at the glass, which is a very familiar reaction by now. “Array?”

“It’s etched really small,” Ed says. “And really lightly. I can maybe draw it bigger, if—”

Knox pulls out a drawer on the nearest end table, extracts a jewelry loupe, and hands it over. “Try that.”

“Perfect,” Ed says. “Thanks.”

“Do I want to know why you have one of those?” Roy asks.

“Some of us,” Knox says, “have _hobbies_. Wild concept, I know.” He bangs open another drawer and manages to find a notepad and a pencil. “Take a seat, kid. Put your feet up. Make yourself at home.”

Mrs. Knox returns with two glasses of water and a little wicker basket full of tea bags. “Don’t mind me—I thought you gentlemen might be thirsty. Are you sure I can’t get you anything? If you like the look of any of the teas, just snag one, and I’ll put the water on for you lickety-split.”

Roy assures her several more times that she’s much too kind. Knox points out that he shouldn’t add anything to the mess until they’ve diagnosed the mess and know for sure that tea won’t interact. Mrs. Knox looks slightly disappointed, so Ed asks if it’d be okay if he had some of the chamomile tea, because he’s hoping it’ll make her feel better even if chamomile tastes a little bit like weeds. When she’s darted off to the kitchen, Ed turns to Roy.

“Does this happen to you everywhere you go?” he asks.

“Not _everywhere_ ,” Roy says. “Although it’s statistically about thirty percent more frequent when I have my hair styled.”

Ed loves that he has the damn _data_ , and hates that that’s so hot.

Like the hair itself. He hates that that’s so hot, too.

“You must be all better,” Ed says, “’cause ‘styled’ has got to be crap. If you try to tell me that you don’t spend an hour every morning making your hair look messy in exactly the right way, I _know_ you’re lying.”

Roy smiles.

Ed hates that, too, so he commits his full attention to transcribing the array on a significantly larger scale.

“All right,” Knox says. “Look at me?”

Ed glances up instinctively, but if he’s very lucky, Knox is too preoccupied with shining a penlight in Roy’s eyes—and Roy is too preoccupied with wincing—to notice.

While Ed works on the array, Knox also checks Roy’s heartbeat, his blood pressure, and his head—for lumps, apparently, and Ed really wants to make a _How would you be able to tell them apart from the ones he gets banging his skull on doorframes when his head gets too big to walk into rooms_ joke, but the words won’t line up right.

His eyes unfocus for a second while he’s trying to wrangle the sentence in his head, though, and then when he looks at the array again—

“Shit,” he says. Then he realizes that he just said that in Knox’s nice house, probably in earshot of Knox’s nice wife, and cringes. “I mean—darn. I mean—look, they tried to put a little bit of a, like, anchor in it, to maintain it on a temporary basis, but it’s _weak_. This shouldn’t last much longer.”

Roy attempts to look at Ed’s handiwork without disrupting the way that Knox’s fingertips are probing his trachea, presumably to feel for damage or something. Ed experiences one of those indescribably strange bouts of jealousy that used to center around Roy on a more-than-weekly basis, where he’d briefly have a burning desire to be a pen, or the ignition gloves, or the cuff of Roy’s uniform jacket. He would really, really like to be running his fingertips up and down Roy’s throat right now; and he really, really wishes he hadn’t just thought about that.

“‘Shouldn’t’ doesn’t hold a lot of water around here,” Knox says, moving the stethoscope to Roy’s chest.

“That’s fair,” Ed says.

“Good to hear all the same,” Roy says. “Do you think—”

“Shut up,” Knox says.

Roy makes a face, but he closes his mouth firmly.

“Holy sh—” Ed just manages to catch himself this time. “How do you get him to _listen_ when you say that?”

Roy looks offended. Knox smiles thinly.

“Scalpel,” Knox says.

“Excellent,” Ed says.

“Not excellent,” Roy says.

“Shut up,” Ed and Knox say at once.

  


* * *

  


Knox insists on driving Ed home, even though Ed—with an assist from Roy, whose vitals appear to be in good order—tries very hard to insist that he doesn’t want to impose any more than they already have. Ed will have to send him and his wife a nice card or something.

“I’ll have Roy call you in the morning sometime,” Knox says after shrugging off the thank-yous. “Just to let you know he’s still alive.”

Ed’s not sure that that’s a good idea, but he’s not in much of a position to argue. “Okay. Thanks.”

“Sure thing,” Knox says. “Go get some sleep.”

“You, too,” Ed says, and then mentally slams the heel of his hand against his forehead. “I mean… hopefully. If Mustang’ll let you.”

Knox grins around an unlit cigarette. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a _lot_ of anesthetics.”

“Good,” Ed says. “Thanks again. G’night.”

Knox ushers him out, and then he heads for their complex at the fastest walk that he can muster so that Knox won’t have to wait as long at the curb for him to get into the door, and then…

“Whoa,” Al says, blinking, as Ed lets himself in. He glances at the clock, and then at Ed, and then at the clock again. He’s sitting on the couch all bundled up in a blanket with his casted leg propped up on their battered coffee table, and Ed feels… good. “You’re back early. Aren’t you? They usually run longer. What happened?”

Ed now feels… less good.

He starts shedding layers right by the coatrack, since one of them left a sweatshirt hanging there, and he’s got every intention of appropriating it as soon as possible. “Roy was there.”

“That doesn’t even begin to answer the question,” Al says, “but I imagine we’ll get there. How is he?”

Ed has managed to be efficient enough about the top layers to free himself from their confines swiftly. He hauls the sweatshirt on over his head instead. Bliss. “Single.”

“Oh,” Al says.

“And causing problems,” Ed says. “Just as you’d expect.”

“Was one of the problems that he’s still obscenely hot?” Al asks.

“Yes,” Ed says.

“Mm,” Al says.

Ed fights his way free of the hood for some better suspicious glaring. “What does that mean?”

“I dunno,” Al says. “You tell me.”

And because he’s Al, and because it’s them, and because it’s Roy, and because the planet turns and makes the constellations seem to wheel around them, Ed has to. So he does.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has said such kind things about this fic so far! ;A; And thanks for your patience while I got my shit together and survived the first ill-advised convention of the year, OTL. (To the small and beautiful handful of readers I met – I LOVE YOU!!!! ♥)
> 
> Also, I'd like to extend a sincere apology to everyone who has come up with brilliant theories about who's responsible for the truth array, because… like… I gotta be honest with you guys. I did it For The Trope and… never intended to explain it. (*SWEATS*) It has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the fic at all! ;A; I promise there is some legitimate political intrigue coming up in Just Another Day, though, if you would like some plot with your schmoop one of these days!
> 
> Another little content note: someone asked me to tag for prior Ed/Ling once a while ago! I didn't want to use the official ship tag in case it makes a false positive for someone who's looking for that content specifically, but I did want to warn for a brief ( _very_ brief XD) reference to it in this chapter, for anyone who's not into that. ♥

Ed tries very hard to sleep, to mixed success. He left one copy of the array with Knox and Roy and made himself a second one, which he tacked up on the wall over his bed. He’s less concerned about the immediate health effects than he is about the concept of someone staging the world’s weirdest hit on Roy in the middle of a social event on friendly territory. The fact that Roy himself wasn’t particularly bothered about it either means that things have gotten worse, and this is so common and expected that advanced alchemical druggings don’t even faze him anymore; or that the drugs in question were pretty potent.

Ed hasn’t made much progress beating his head against that figurative wall—maybe the literal one is the logical next step—when he wakes to the dulcet tones of Al banging the cabinets a bit the next morning. He drags himself out of bed, because it’s his brotherly duty to try to help. And also because it’s loud as _hell_.

“Lookin’ for something?” he manages from the doorway.

“Your common sense,” Al says.

“Ouch,” Ed says.

“I’m kidding,” Al says, trying to get up on one tiptoe despite the crutches, which looks like a losing battle if Ed’s ever seen one—and he’s seen a few. “Mostly. Sort of. You had Roy at your mercy. Why didn’t you ask him out on a date?”

“That’s exactly why,” Ed says. “I don’t want a mercy date. That sounds even worse than a pity date. Plus he’s obviously just rebounding from Diane, whatever the fuck he said when he was drugged.”

“Truth-drugged,” Al says. “Meaning that ‘whatever the fuck he said’ was completely honest.”

“You sure?” Ed says. “You _sure_ the unrivaled loophole master couldn’t wriggle his way out somehow?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s how truth drugs work,” Al says, “but what do I know?”

“Lots,” Ed says, because he can’t put Al down even when the delightful little shit totally deserves it. “Are you looking for coffee?”

“Of course I’m looking for coffee,” Al says. “So what would you do if—”

“Coffee first,” Ed says. “Interrogation later.”

  


* * *

  


He’d thought he’d been hoping against hope, but the coffee actually distracts Al enough that he doesn’t bring Roy or the specific philosophical constraints of truth-drugging up again. Ed dares to dream that he might be off the hook for the rest of his precious weekend, free to squander at least a few hours before he has to prep for class.

Then the phone rings.

Al is remarkably quick for someone on crappy crutches. He books it to the phone before Ed even manages to set down his coffee cup.

It’s a good thing that Ed sets it down, though, because Al says, “Oh! Hello! Good morning. What can I help you with?”

Ed is scowling as loudly as he can, but it isn’t gaining any traction.

“Well,” Al says, sounding altogether too smug about whatever the fuck it is that he’s talking about with whoever the fuck is talking to him. Ed has a sneaking and very bad suspicion. “You don’t say. That’s a very interesting proposition.” He turns and smiles winsomely at Ed. “It’s General Mustang,” he says without even covering the mouthpiece, the _heathen_. “He wants to know if you’ll go out to dinner with him.”

“How the fuck did he get this number?” Ed says when the room stops spinning. There are, the record should show, occasions where he hates being right.

“He says ‘yes’,” Al says into the phone. “Specifically, ‘Yes, please, that sounds wonderful, I’d like that ever so much; when shall we plan for’.”

“ _Al_!” Ed says.

“That’s me!” Al says brightly.

“Tell him to get fucked,” Ed says.

Al twirls a finger in the phone cord. “General Mustang says that that should probably wait until after dessert.”

In the silence, after Ed’s jaw drops, Al blinks a couple times. Then Ed distantly hears what might be Roy sputtering helplessly into the phone.

“Okay,” Al says. “He didn’t say that. I made that up.”

Ed’s voice produces something very weak that sounds sort of like _Haghh_ even to his own ears.

“That’s your problem now,” Al says into the phone. “You’re welcome. Where are you going to go? You shouldn’t go anywhere fancy; he had to dress up fancy last night, and he’ll throw a fit if he has to do it two days in a row. What time are you going to pick him up?”

“ _Al_ ,” Ed says.

“Still me,” Al says. “Six sounds great! And casual sounds great. He’s so excited.”

“I’m dying,” Ed says. “Al, you killed me. You killed your brother.”

“Quit being so dramatic,” Al says. “You’ve been putting this off for, like, five solid years. I’m doing you a favor.” He pauses, and then he speaks into the phone again. “Well, I _was_ talking to Ed, but I guess it sort of applies to you, too.”

“So dead,” Ed says. “Extra dead. Dead squared. Dead cubed. Dead to the power of death. Extinct. Expired. Extinguished. Hand me the dictionary. Stop talking to the enemy.”

“Okay,” Al says. He turns to the phone again. “So we’ll see you at six?”

“ _Dead_ ,” Ed says, as loudly as he can.

“Lovely,” Al says.

Ed crosses the room to drop himself facedown on the couch. “You’d better write me the most bitchin’ obituary anybody’s ever _seen_.”

“Sure, Brother,” Al says. “Do you think there’s time to get some flowers?”

Al has not yet earned Ed looking up. “What for?”

“You’re hopeless,” Al says.

“No,” Ed says. “I’m dead.”

“You’re both,” Al says.

  


* * *

  


Somehow—Ed is still struggling with the particulars—he ends up sitting across a table from Roy Mustang that night.

Unsurprising, but nonetheless confusing, is the fact that Roy has managed to find what must be the only burger place in the nation-state of Amestris that serves wine.

“You know that this is weird, right?” Ed says.

Roy looks very different and very delectable in a well-fitted button-down shirt. In observance of the ‘casual’ dress code, he left it untucked, the absolute _animal_.

“Us having a private conversation on purpose this time?” Roy says.

“No,” Ed says. “Wine with fucking hamburgers. Is this even legal? I’m gonna ask Falman. Or just assume it can’t be and file a complaint.”

Roy is swirling the wine around in his glass. Usually Ed figures that people do that entirely to make themselves look fake-sophisticated, but he has a creeping premonition that Roy’s doing it to keep his hands occupied. Roy was smoothing the tablecloth a lot more than it merited earlier.

Which is… interesting. Roy has, necessarily, some of the best-hidden poker tells in the business. If he’s agitated enough to make mistakes that Ed can spot without even watching all that closely—

“Wait until you try the food first,” Roy says. “You may not want to sabotage them after that.”

Ed eyes him. “You take a lot of dates here?”

“Not very often,” Roy says. “Riza and I found this spot a couple years ago, but I don’t tend to share it with other people all that much.”

Ed eyes him harder. “Why not?”

“Because it’s become somewhat special,” Roy says, “as a result of being almost always only ours.”

Ed eyes him harder still, not that he’s made any progress thus far. “Then why are you sharing it with me?”

“Because _you’re_ special,” Roy says. “And watching you discover things for the first time is one of life’s unrivaled pleasures.”

Ed isn’t sure whether vomiting on the table or bursting into tears is a more rational reaction. The decision is made more difficult by the fact that both would be inappropriate and disruptive, but not unprecedented in a restaurant. How the hell are you supposed to navigate options like that?

Roy looks delighted with himself. At least that creates the opportunity for a third reaction, which is throwing a spoon at his face. Ed is teetering on the verge of that one.

“What did you think I was going to say?” Roy asks. “‘I like getting tipsy and eating fries’?”

“ _That’s_ one of life’s pleasures,” Ed manages. “You’re just some sort of stalker-weirdo.”

“Very likely,” Roy says, which obviously doesn’t help matters much. He hesitates for a second, swirling the wine even faster this time—enough that Ed keeps an eye on it, but Roy has always had such extraordinary control of his hands that of course it never quite arcs up over the rim. “I’m… glad. That we made it here. It was… rather a long time coming.”

Ed swallows. Twice.

“Are you planning,” he gets out, “to keep up this schmoopy, over-the-top appreciation thing all night?”

“Well,” Roy says, and the sly arch of his eyebrow makes him look a lot more familiar, “the time that I tried subtlety certainly didn’t work.”

He thinks he’s so damn funny that he goes to take a sip of his wine to punctuate the punchline.

So Ed widens his eyes, starts to reach across the table, and says, “ _Don’t_ —!”

Roy chokes, coughs, wheezes, narrowly avoids pouring wine all over the checkered tablecloth, blinks to clear the water from his eyes, and gazes at Ed in abjection.

Ed snickers.

For a second, Roy stares; and then he starts to scowl.

“I’m not entirely sure I deserved that,” he says.

“I am,” Ed says. He picks up the menu so that he can’t get distracted by how tempting Roy’s mouth looks when he’s pushing his bottom lip out like that. “So what’s good?”

There is a part of Ed—a part trained by trauma, one day and one year and one crumpled expectation at a time—that still believes that Roy is faking. There is a part of him actively and avidly wondering if Roy is going to yank the rug out from underneath his feet before the end of the night; if there will be a triumphant call of _Ha_ ha _! You really thought I meant it? You really thought I’d give you a first chance, let alone a second one after you fouled it up? You really thought I ever actually liked you at all?_

The things that were said the other night don’t seem especially real. Conversations that take place in perfect isolation like that waver at the edges. The surreality of the whole situation has nudged it into a completely separate category in Ed’s mind—that information doesn’t count. Those revelations aren’t real. That experience didn’t really exist in any meaningful way; it unfolded in some sort of foggy parallel dreamworld, and none of it holds any water here.

It doesn’t help that Roy seems… different. It’s a tiny nuance, but it keeps sticking in Ed’s perception, nagging like a hangnail. Roy is unsettled in some way. He’s being… careful. Restrained. He’s holding back. He’s not who he used to be in the office, when it was just the two of them; he hasn’t opened the full extent of himself tonight. He’s wearing a mask. He’s playing a part, and possibly a game.

Ed’s inner Al has been reminding him _extremely_ loudly that there’s data to support a charitable interpretation of this. Roy was, at least theoretically, fully honest in that stupid bathroom at that stupid party. It is likely—it is _probable_ —that thinking that he’d lost his chance with Ed back in the day had hurt him, even if most of the damage was dealt directly to his ego, rather than to anything softer. Trying to make someone fun and nice and interesting like Diane happy and then being forced to admit insufficiency there, too, must have hurt even more. Roy isn’t made of metal. He isn’t made of steel. He’s not a statue; he’s not a pillar; he’s not carved marble. He’s a man. Ed learned that a long time ago. Ed loved him for it.

It is likely, and perhaps probable, that as a result of all of the recent battles lost, Roy is working very hard to present the version of himself tonight that he thinks that Ed will find most palatable.

That’s sort of a kind thing, in a Roy way.

The problem is that it’s an obnoxious thing in an Ed way.

Ed’s so shit with this kind of nonsense that by the time the bill comes, he’s still working on a way to wrap _Being your authentic idiot self is way more attractive to me, by the way_ up into a sentence that doesn’t make Roy turn on one heel and keep walking until he gets to Xing. Roy wants to split the cost proportionally instead of in half, because the wine was expensive or something, which at least makes more sense than most of what’s happened this evening. Ed’s not sure what the dating etiquette book—which no one can produce for him, but which everyone seems to have memorized—would say about that sort of thing, but it’s _logical_ , at least. Logic has to count for something.

Maybe the book also says something about this part—the stepping out of the restaurant with your coats on part. The _what the hell happens now_ part. Ed doesn’t have a clue.

He figures that he might as well throw a clever segue into the mix and see if something explodes:

“Um…”

Well. That’ll just… have to do.

“I was thinking,” Roy says, straightening his lapels as if that’s a thing that an ordinary person has ever done; “that we could… take a walk through the park, if you like. Of course, if you’d prefer to call it an evening—”

“Nah,” Ed says. He hasn’t gotten to the bottom of this yet, for one thing; and for another, spending time with a weird, stilted varietal of Roy is still spending time with Roy, and he still likes it. Mostly. Sort of. Other than the fact that he’s on edge, but maybe…

Maybe this is a golden opportunity to strip the mask off and dispel that part.

Al’s always saying stuff like _Just because things didn’t go the way you wanted doesn’t mean that they went_ wrong _._

“Park by itself is a little bit boring,” Ed says. “I used to have to cut through on my way home from work every day, and there’s only so many times you can walk by the same statue and the same lampposts before you start recognizing individual ducks. And then you want to name them.” That is, unfortunately, true. “How about something a little different?”

Roy has stopped smoothing his lapels and started paying very close attention, which is progress. “How do you mean?”

“Let’s take a walk,” Ed says. “But let’s make it like a… scavenger hunt. Let’s see how long it takes us to walk to six places where one of us has almost gotten killed.”

Neither of them would have made it this far if they weren’t suckers for a challenge, usually to a fault.

Sure enough, Roy’s starting to smile—and there’s a wry, almost dark tilt to it much more suited to the Roy that Ed remembers than to the one that he just went to dinner with.

“How bad is it that my first thought was ‘That won’t take long’?” Roy asks. “And how bad is it that my second thought was ‘But it would be so much faster in East City’?”

“Exactly the right amount of bad,” Ed says, meaning it. “You want to start?”

“I’d be delighted,” Roy says, and the smile splits into a grin, and it’s warm and bright and mischievous and unrestrained, and Ed—

Shit. Ed’s going to have to tell Al that he was right.

It might even be worth it.

It’s barely three blocks from the park to an alleyway where Roy got into a nasty scuffle as a kid, and one of his teenaged adversaries menaced him with a knife before the cops happened to intervene.

“And you just _let_ ’em?” Ed says.

Roy blinks. “Let… the police—”

“No,” Ed says. “Let those kids pull a knife on you like they were gonna cut you up into mince and serve you to a pet.”

Roy wrinkles his nose, which is fucking adorable. “By the time the knife was in evidence, it was a bit too late to do anything about it.”

“Jeez,” Ed says. “How old were you?”

“Eight,” Roy says.

“Okay,” Ed says. “I guess that’s a little better. How big was the knife?”

“It looked enormous,” Roy says, “but if the slightly blurry memories of the encounter serve, it was a fairly standard switchblade, so probably four inches at a maximum.”

The faces that Roy has been making have left Ed feeling generous. This is a real Roy again. This is a better one. “Four inches is a lot of knife when you’re eight.”

“It is,” Roy says. “And I didn’t run very fast, and I wasn’t nearly so skilled a negotiator.” He pauses. “In part because at that point I still had a lisp.”

At least it’s Ed’s turn to blink bewilderedly. “Really?”

“Exacerbated,” Roy says, “by the remarkably awkward patterns in which my baby teeth fell out. Once that was all over, I eradicated it by force.”

Ed can’t think of anything useful to say, but at least there’s always: “I never would’ve guessed.”

“Then my attempts were successful,” Roy says.

Ed can’t believe this.

Not the lisp thing—although that is really interesting. He can’t believe that his not-so-sinister plan to twist a weird date activity into a way of tricking Roy into sharing information about himself is _working_.

“Huh,” Ed says.

Roy raises his eyebrows, and he’s smiling, and he looks so damn good in quasi-casual clothes and his stupid coat and a _real_ expression that Ed has to curl the fingers of both hands into fists to stop himself from doing anything stupid.

“Your turn,” Roy says.

“Okay,” Ed says. “We’re pretty close to a place where I’ve got a double-header. You ready? C’mon.”

Roy recognizes that they’re heading towards the university, and he asks about alchemy club—which means that he remembered that it existed, which means that he was paying attention when Ed started sending Al along to pub nights with that excuse, which means that it had still mattered to him at that point not just that Ed was absent, but specifically why.

Ed tells him that alchemy club is going fine, which is mostly true; Roy asks how many explosions and/or combustions there have been, and Ed says “Not that many!”, which is slightly-less-mostly true. He can’t help it if these kids—which is how he thinks of them, weirdly, even though a number of them are practically his age—get excited about the prospect of lighting shit up, and excitement is what he banks on to get them to learn. He probably would have made it a lot further in school himself if his teachers had been invested in his _excitement_ , not just his obedience.

Assuring Roy that they have never damaged anything in any classrooms or other university-owned areas that Ed wasn’t immediately able to fix with minimal alchemy marks, and making progressively more dismissive faces at the way Roy nods and _Mhm, I’m sure_ s him the whole time, occupies them until they reach their destination. The destination in question is the single most dangerous intersection in the history of academics, as far as Ed can tell.

“On my third day of work,” Ed says, “I’d been up late writing notes for lectures and stuff the night before, so I got up a little late, and I didn’t have time for coffee, so I was nervous as hell, and my reflexes were shit. Right there…” He points to the precise square of sidewalk, which is a little ways down from where they stand.

The south gate to university property waits innocently across from it, as if it doesn’t know what hell it’s wrought. Even at eight o’clock on a Sunday night, cars keep veering around the corner and whipping past them, so Ed thinks Roy probably already gets the point.

“I was thinking about my lecture,” Ed says, “so I looked one way, but I didn’t look the other until I’d already taken a step down into the street, and…”

He makes what he hopes is an evocative gesture even though he doesn’t go too wild with the person-splattering motions.

“Just had that sixth sense,” he says, “and I jumped back, and the car missed me by what sure fuckin’ felt like three inches.”

Roy winces hard. “I… imagine you didn’t make that mistake more than once. But you said there were two, didn’t you?”

“Yup,” Ed says. He points again, shifting the angle just slightly. “You see that little trail that crosses the main path there and goes off into the trees? It gets pretty steep pretty fast off to the left there, and students come down that sucker on their bikes at about a million miles an hour. I had basically the same experience a couple weeks later, only with a bike, and the kid actually clipped me.”

Roy winces even harder. “Oh, hell. What happened?”

Ed looks both ways—not because he expects the cars to stop appearing from the ether and whisking by, but because he’d prefer not to disturb any passersby who might recognize one of them and write to the newspapers—before lifting his shirt and pointing to the newer, pinker scar that that experience added to his collection just under his ribcage.

“The upshot was that the guy was a medical student,” he says. “The downside is that I was still late to my own damn class. That’s embarrassing.”

“If you were actively bleeding,” Roy says, “I think you had a good excuse.”

“You’ve clearly never turned up late to an early-morning class of undergraduates,” Ed says. “Smelling like blood makes it worse. I thought they were gonna kill me for sport and not even eat me afterwards. What a waste.”

In the half-second pause, he thinks that he went overboard—of course he did. His life has been weird; his childhood was a mess; his sense of humor is warped as shit. Not too many people get it, and it’s hard to tell if the ones who do actually like it or not.

And then Roy laughs.

“Unconscionable,” Roy says. “What little demons. Did you manage to get them under control again? Perhaps by explaining that you’d just survived an encounter that would have laid out a lesser mortal for most of a week?”

“It didn’t even damage any organs,” Ed says. “I think. Not a big deal. Didn’t want to bore ’em. Hey, your turn next. Three to go. We’re doing a pretty good job so far.”

Roy arches one eyebrow this time. “Are we? Do you play this game often?”

“No,” Ed says. “I just made it up a couple minutes ago. You got one, or not?”

“Of course I do,” Roy says.

Thinking about it, having so many damn choices for near-death experiences probably factors in to why they’re both so fucked up.

The walk to the next one takes a little while, but Ed gets the sense that neither of them is really keeping time at this point. Roy passes the trip updating Ed faux-offhandedly about a lot of the schemings and machinations that have been going on since Ed left the team, which is fascinating enough that Ed could probably listen to it for hours on end anyway. None of the codenames that they used to use for talking shit about their opponents in public have changed—which could just be a matter of simple laziness; or which could be because Roy trusted Ed never to share them. Either way, there’s something weirdly comforting about it.

By the sound of it, Roy has a very feeble handle on things, and he’s expecting some storms in the coming months, but he sounds relatively optimistic about the prospect, albeit also generally sort of exhausted. Ed remembers that feeling very well.

He’s so engrossed in catching up and asking questions and digging down to the juicy stuff that he almost doesn’t notice when Roy stops across the street from yet another too-familiar military building with hedges and a chain-link fence encircling the perimeter.

Ed recognizes Lab 3—and, at the same moment, connects it with the things that he heard from Al about the encounter with Lust and the way it almost ended.

“A classic, I like to think,” Roy says, nodding to the nearest loomingly nondescript white wall. “And a very close call, as the almost-dying thing goes.”

“Al told me a little,” Ed says. “The cauterization thing was fucking brilliant.”

“I’m not sure I would say that,” Roy says, “but between the options of that or bleeding out and imminently expiring when I knew that Havoc had minutes at best, and Riza and your brother were probably next… it seemed like the more practical choice.”

It’s just like him to downplay it. Ed heard the story. That one still sometimes wakes Al up in the middle of the night. Ed can only imagine what it’s like for Roy, who was so much closer to the worst of it—who almost had to watch someone that he cared about die facedown on the floor.

“Yeah,” Ed says. “That logic’s pretty sound. Well—I guess it goes without saying that I’m glad you made it out of that whole mess. And I’m glad you made sure that everybody else did, too.”

“We wouldn’t have without your brother,” Roy says. “I’m not sure if I ever remembered to write him a thank-you-for-saving-our-asses card. Do you think it would be uncouth to send one five years late?”

“He’d prefer a cake anyway,” Ed says. “I bet if you paid enough, you could get a bakery to write that in icing on the top.”

“Perfect,” Roy says, and the gleam of his grin makes chain-link and barbed-wire and dull white walls look weirdly charming. “So—where to next?”

“We’re pretty close,” Ed says. “Makin’ good time, huh?”

“Record-setting, I’d imagine,” Roy says.

  


* * *

  


Ed leads the way back towards headquarters. His and Al’s apartment was, locationally speaking, an absolute steal—it’s just about midway between HQ and the university, not that he knew that the latter would come in handy; both are within fairly comfortable walking distance. He’s always suspected that Roy mostly just takes a car everywhere as a status thing, though he once pinpointed the address that he wasn’t supposed to have seen on a map, and Roy’s place is substantially further out towards the suburbs. Bastard probably even has a _lawn_. After Resembool, apartment living sometimes feels suffocating in ways that Ed doesn’t even have the vocabulary to describe, although at least the dorms trained him pretty well to close his eyes and shut his mouth and cope with it.

Ed doesn’t take them all the way to Central Command, anyway: he stops near what might look like an ordinary alleyway if one was less intimately familiar with the deliberately geometric layout of the city center and its wheel-spoke roads.

“This could be a number of things,” Roy says. “But I’m leaning towards MacDougal.”

Ed eyes him. “That’s just creepy.”

The little rueful smile is not creepy; it’s cute. Barf. “Sorry. It seemed like the way your mind might run given the previous conversation.”

That’s actually scarier, but in a way that is much deeper, much gentler, and much worse.

Fundamentally, Roy understands the way Ed thinks.

That’s terrifying.

“There was one thing he did in particular,” Ed says, “that I just can’t get over. I dunno if he tried it on you, too—he’d freeze the water in blood and turn it into weapons. That’s so fucking awesome, capitalizing on the iron like that? But I was mostly just trying to stay alive, so I couldn’t pay too much attention to it, and obviously I didn’t get a chance to ask him anything, but… it was just so damn _cool_.”

“Including literally,” Roy says, but his hands are in his pockets, and his eyes are far away.

“Did you know him?” Ed asks. “Before all the… everything. He was in Ishval.”

“We weren’t especially well-acquainted,” Roy says. “They threw us all together when they shipped us out, but Alex and I just hopped on at East City, so we weren’t even in transit with the rest of them for very long. He was… I wouldn’t have picked him out as a particularly upstanding sort of man, but he had the guts to defect and try to speak truth directly to power even though he must have known that it would be the death of him sooner or later. That counts for a lot.”

“You’re getting somewhere,” Ed says.

Roy blinks, mostly suppresses a shudder, and glances at him. “I—beg pardon?”

“You’re making progress,” Ed says. “I know it’s probably so glacial that it doesn’t feel like it to you, but now that I’m outside of it, I can actually see it better. Shit’s moving. Shit’s changing. You can see it in the papers, and you can see it in people. What you’re doing matters, and it’s working, even if it’s working slow.”

Roy looks at him for a long, long moment—long enough that the solemnity of it makes Ed’s skin prickle. Long enough that he wonders if saying that was way the fuck out of line. What does he know, anyway? What right does he have to—

“Thank you,” Roy says, softly. “That… means a lot.”

“Shouldn’t,” Ed says, kicking one foot at the pavement for good measure. “It’s not like I know anything. I just told you I almost got killed by a kid on a bike.”

“You know a truly remarkable amount of things,” Roy says, “and kids on bikes are formidable and have no documented negative effect on the quality of one’s input.”

They look at each other for another second.

“Is there a paper out on that?” Ed asks.

“There will be,” Roy says, “as soon as I write one on the back of some forms tomorrow.”

“Lieutenant Hawkeye’s gonna kill you,” Ed says.

“That’s the perfect segue,” Roy says. He turns around and gestures grandly to Central Command. “Number six. This one, I believe, is fairly self-explanatory.”

“Sorta,” Ed says. It’s starting to get chilly enough that he’s pushing his hands progressively deeper into his own pockets. Maybe it’s all that talk about MacDougal making him cold. “Which near-death experience were you thinking of? The big one? Or one of those meetings where you came back and had to put your head down on the table for two hours while people offered to make you coffee? Or that time I faked like I was gonna throw a stapler at your head, and then my hand slipped?”

“Mm,” Roy says. “Rarely have I been quite so glad that one of my employees had exhibited terrifically bad aim. I _was_ thinking of the first one, but now that you mention it, we are rather spoiled for choice, aren’t we?”

Ed eyes him. “That’s… one way of putting it, I guess.” He tries to resist the urge to hunch his shoulders, but it seems to be getting the best of him. “It’s kinda funny. Our lives used to be pretty exciting. These days…”

“What do you mean ‘these days’?” Roy says. “Just because it’s staplers and hellions on bicycles doesn’t mean it’s not _exciting_.”

Ed frowns. “I think I’d take the unkillable monsters over the bikes, honestly.”

“There’s something to be said for monsters who look like monsters,” Roy says, “rather than like every other person that you pass.”

“They weren’t, though,” Ed says. “Or not all of them, and not all the way through. That was the worst part. They _were_ like the people, in a lot of ways.”

“All the more reason to do better, then, I suppose,” Roy says. “To do right by everyone we lost and everything we learned.”

They look at each other.

“Eew,” Ed says.

“I know,” Roy says. “I’m sorry. Sincerely. That… well, it’s been a rather long weekend, hasn’t it?”

“You can say that again,” Ed says.

Roy gives him the cheesy grin. “It’s been a rather—”

“Shut up,” Ed says. “This is your only warning.”

Roy looks around them, pauses, and grimaces. “Ah. It’s… a bit of a hike back to the car, isn’t it? I could call a cab, and—”

“You big baby,” Ed says. “It’s barely a mile.”

Roy grimaces harder. “Hard at work keeping me young, I see.”

“You’re the one who suggested a romantic walk or whatever,” Ed says. “We’re gonna get to go through the park just like you wanted.”

Roy is now trying avidly not to smile, without much success. “It is strangely comforting that you have not lost your knack for turning my own ideas on their heads and then throwing them back in my face.”

“‘Comforting’?” Ed says.

“I’m being diplomatic,” Roy says.

“Well, you should be ambulatory instead,” Ed says. “C’mon. We’ve both got to work tomorrow, right?”

“Unfortunately,” Roy says.

Ed’s not quite sure what that means—or how much it means—and it’s been long enough since he tracked and backtracked these sidestreets that he might embarrass himself if he doesn’t pay attention, so he doesn’t comment. Just this once.

Roy manages to wait out almost an entire block in moderately calm silence before he needs the sound of his own voice to survive again: “May I ask you something?”

Ed shoots him a smirk so that he knows that Ed’s response is not meant to be as mean as it probably sounds. “We already had the conversation about how trying to stop you from talking is like holding back the tide with two hands. And I don’t even _have_ two hands.”

The way that Roy keeps looking at him when he says shit like that makes his skin crawl—but in a good way, if there is such a thing. He hadn’t thought there was. It’s less a centipede-feet sort of crawling and more like a tingle.

Before he can even attempt to find a way to address _that_ , though, Roy’s gaze goes sort of guarded.

“Do you miss it?” Roy says. “The… your old job.”

Before the whole fiasco, Ed had managed to teach himself—slowly and sometimes painfully, but he’d kept at it—how to let the walls down with Roy. They’d both been so acclimated to circling around each other, staring one another down and snarking fast and acidic, refusing to show the slightest sign of weakness, that training himself to stay calm and risk vulnerability had taken a lot of time.

And then he’d transmuted the walls right back up on instinct after the thing with Diane.

Maybe he doesn’t have to dismantle them all tonight, though. Maybe he can just punch through a couple bricks—enough space to see through, and speak through, and that’ll get the point across.

“I don’t really miss the job,” Ed says. “I miss the team. I miss feeling like part of something.” He works the spit around in his mouth for a couple of seconds. Equivalent exchange will see him through, here, won’t it? If he finds it in himself to give something up? “I miss all your bullshit. And your not-bullshit. And your stapler-dodging.”

“There’s always a place for you,” Roy says, very quietly, eyes on the pale halo around the streetlamp up ahead. “If you ever change your mind.”

“Thank you,” Ed says. He means it, too. He hopes Roy can hear that.

His whole life has been defined by leaving stuff behind—by moving on and never turning back; trying to never even _look_ back for fear that he’ll crumble and retreat. He doesn’t get a whole lot of second chances. He’s been flying by the seat of his pants and grappling his way through on sheer gumption since he was twelve. He’s not sure he’s ever _had_ a fallback plan before, and Roy just offered him a really nice one.

“Same goes for you at the university,” Ed says, “if you ever decide that you’ve had enough of the pigpen, and you just gotta quit.”

Roy makes a face. They’re already coming up on the edge of the park; Ed thinks it is very charitable of him to resist the urge to comment on how brief the walk was after all. “I’m not sure that would go over especially well.”

“You kidding?” Ed says. “You’d charm the pants off of everybody—well, I guess that could be a separate problem. But my next point was gonna be that that guy Paul, who didn’t even understand how Flame Alchemy works, is a professor in _chemistry_. The standards are not exactly sky-high, here. Pretty sure they’d fall all over themselves trying to hire you. They’d probably throw in a signing bonus and an all-expenses-paid vacation and a car.”

“Hmm,” Roy says. “Might depend on the destination.”

“Does anybody ever vacation anywhere but Creta?” Ed says. He pauses. “I dunno why I asked you that, since you obviously don’t even know what a ‘vacation’ is.”

“Brutal but fair,” Roy says. “With my luck, I think they’d ship me to Drachma with a little monogrammed snow hat with a pompon on, and then Olivier would murder me in cold blood—very literally cold blood—for disparaging the dignity of the military. I should probably keep this job, just in case.”

“All right,” Ed says. “But if you’re ever on the fence, you could come watch me lecture or something. Security’s shit. You could just wander in any time you wanted.”

Roy’s smile makes Ed’s heart do stupid things. “Thank you. I’d very much like that. It’s good to know that there are some perks for you, at any rate.”

“There are a couple,” Ed says. His heart is still doing stupid things, and has enlisted the help of his brain, which is now too preoccupied in assisting with the stupid things to filter the words coming out of his mouth: “One of which is that the fraternization laws obviously don’t apply anymore, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

Roy looks up sharply, which makes Ed’s heart _stop_ doing stupid things and just start pounding urgently. That’s more familiar.

“What?” Ed blurts out before he can help himself. “It’s—true. And I thought—that was part of the point. Of… this. Now. Today.”

Roy swallows and runs his tongue across his upper lip before he speaks, which all amounts to one giant flag in the color of Ed’s old coat.

“It was,” Roy says. “But I hadn’t… realized… that you might want to… continue.”

Ed’s legs refuse to keep walking while he’s staring at Roy like this. “You… wait. You didn’t—you think—”

“I wasn’t sure that I could qualify this,” Roy says, very delicately, looking out at the trees past Ed’s shoulder, “as one of the more successful dates that I’ve undertaken in my life.”

Ed keeps staring. Maybe they’ll just have to stand here in the park until they both starve.

“Oh,” Ed says. It sounds even worse than it feels, and it feels like a leaden load of cold slag dropping into his guts. “Well. I thought it… was.”

Roy blinks at him. At least that’s better than him blinking at the damn trees. “I… see. I—may I ask you another question?”

“Holy shit, Roy,” Ed says. “How many times are we going to have to do this?”

“Sorry,” Roy says. “In that case—have you ever actually been on a date before?”

Ed only has to grit his teeth a little bit before the murder goes away. “Does babysitting you in that bathroom at Armstrong’s place and then getting you over to Knox count?”

“No,” Roy says.

“Then no,” Ed says.

“Ah,” Roy says. “That… explains some things.”

Fancy that. Right back to murder. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Roy extracts his hands from his pockets and waves them in front of himself. “It wasn’t—I didn’t mean it in a _bad_ way. Just… it… I thought you were miserable.”

At least when the world is spinning like this, Ed’s too dizzy to follow through with the murder impulse. Prison sounds boring. “Why the hell would you think that? Because I wasn’t clinging to your arm and cooing in your ear all night? Is that the industry standard, or what?”

“Um,” Roy says.

“Well, shit,” Ed says. “I don’t like getting in people’s personal space. And you never get to have any psychological space, so I figured that you probably don’t have much personal space most of the time, either, so the novelty of it would be nice, and—you thought I was _miserable_? Why the hell would you think that?”

Roy has the grace to shove his hands into his pockets and hunch his shoulders. “You were mostly looking at me like I was a puzzle over dinner, so I thought…”

“That’s ’cause you were acting weird,” Ed says.

It clicks.

“Wait,” he says. “Don’t fucking tell me. I was watching you too close because you were acting weird, which made you act weirder because you thought I wasn’t having fun, and then—”

“And then we catalogued places where we almost died,” Roy says.

“But that _is_ fun,” Ed says. “It’s definitely more fun than cataloguing places where people actually died. Reminds you how badass you are, doing all that not-dying.”

Roy is smiling at him again. “You… enjoyed yourself?”

Evidently not enough—not enough to do it right. Not enough for Roy to notice. Not enough for it to make any damn difference at all.

“Of course I fucking did,” Ed says. It’s still the truth. “You’re fun, when you’re not walking around with a stick up your ass; and you’re really funny when you don’t try too hard; and…” He throws his hands up. “Whatever.”

The smile is parting into a grin, and Ed keeps trying to find other things to look at so that he won’t stand here and just blush his way into oblivion.

“You know,” Roy says, “it’s… it was really rather silly of me to think that I could interpret this like any other date.” He pauses, and there’s the smirk, and Ed is _fucked_ , and— “You might even say it was somewhat shortsighted.”

“Oh, wow,” Ed says. The adrenaline is rushing right out and dropping him to the pavement. This is what he gets, isn’t it? An ‘unsuccessful’ date and a height joke and a door slammed in his face. “Will you look at that? It’s time-to-go-the-fuck-home o’clock. C’mon, we should leave time for me to kick your ass when we get to the car.”

Al’s wrong. It _was_ a fucking pity date. Ed, in his unrivaled stupidity, still likes Roy too much to put him through another iteration of this shit when the first one went so wrong. This is it, isn’t it? This is it, and it’s going to have to be enough.

“Wait,” Roy says.

“What?” Ed says. He can’t imagine a universe where there are words to encapsulate the shit he feels—the whole big seething mess of resignation and dismay and bitterness twisting under the banner of _I guess we’re both better off alone_. “You think of another way you want me to sabotage it? Just give me instructions so I can be more efficient this time.”

“You haven’t sabotaged anything,” Roy says.

Ed’s heart doesn’t flutter so much as roll over forlornly, but at least that means it still works.

“Just—wait,” Roy says. “Right there. Stand right there.”

Ed takes one more stride just to spite the order before turning around and doing his absolute damnedest to hold up the glare.

Roy’s too fast to run from, and too much, and too damn long-awaited. He comes closer, and then—slowly, slow enough that Ed could back away—too close.

“Hold on,” Roy says. “Take…” He glances up at the streetlamp almost directly above them; gauges something unfathomable; shuffles back. “One step towards me.”

“This is the worst game ever,” Ed says. He does it, though. Because it’s fucking Roy, and precious few people humor Roy most of the time. “Keep that in mind if you try to patent it.”

“I will,” Roy says.

Then Roy lifts one hand slowly— _so_ slowly—and brushes his knuckles against the fall of Ed’s bangs, guiding them back so gently that it feels more like a breeze through them than it does like a touch.

“I’d like to ask you one more question,” he says.

“I’d like a nap,” Ed says. It doesn’t even sound very strangled, which he considers an accomplishment.

“When you quit the military,” Roy says, “did you miss _me_?”

Ed’s whole chest goes tight. He can’t tell if it originates in anger at the sheer obviousness of that question, or from the fact that everything in him just hurts.

“You fucking _know_ I did,” he fights out. “Like a goddamn limb. Believe me.”

“I always do,” Roy says. His fingertips graze Ed’s cheek; electricity ripples down Ed’s spine. “But this is—”

“Different?” Ed says. “I gave up lying to you when you stopped deserving it.”

“I’m not sure that ever happened,” Roy says.

“Shut up,” Ed says. The streelamp burns yellow above them, shimmering hot behind Roy’s head like a crown of flame. Looking up at him is always torture, but usually not like _this_. “Why the hell do we have to stand right here, anyway?”

“It’s part of my desperate last-ditch stratagem to salvage this date,” Roy says.

“It doesn’t need to be salvaged,” Ed says, and if Roy just stands there feather-lightly touching his face for the rest of time, that’ll be true. “What the hell does where we’re standing have to do with that, anyway?”

“I’ve done several surveys,” Roy says. “This is the single most romantic place in the park at night—best views, best lighting, most even pavement.” Ed’s about to ask what _that_ has to do with anything, and then remembers all the times that he tripped over completely flat parts of the carpet at HQ. Roy’s fingertip just grazed down his jaw and burned out several critical circuits in his brain, so it’s going to take at least a minute for his language centers to reboot anyway. “It’s the perfect place to kiss someone.”

“Huh,” Ed grinds out despite the major mechanical failures. “You got somebody in particular in mind, or should we pop down to the shops for a sec and see who’s around?”

“Cretin,” Roy says lovingly. “I do, as it happens. And it’s you. It’s been you for years. It’s been you for so long that I can’t imagine a world where it isn’t, and hasn’t been, and wouldn’t be. It’s been you for so long, and so _much_ , that I almost gave up hope.”

Ed makes a face at him. Their faces are so close that it feels dangerous, but he has a moral obligation to be a little bit of an asshole at times like this. “You are a walking cliché.”

Roy arches an eyebrow and angles the smirk. “One that you’d make out with?”

The next face makes itself without any work from Ed, and it’s an awful grimace. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are that you’re so fucking hot?”

“Yes,” Roy says. “Not just any idea—an extremely extensive, painstakingly detailed one.”

“Okay,” Ed says. “As long as you know.”

Roy is… gazing at him. There’s no other word for it. Ed is fairly sure that the universe has flipped on its head, and it’s probably only a matter of time before gravity reverses, and they all go careening off into the void among the stars and asphyxiate.

With any luck, he’s got a couple more minutes before then, because apparently the unparalleled master of giving hints is absolutely shit at taking them.

“That was also an ‘Okay, you can kiss me’,” Ed says. “You know. Just for the reco—”

It’s Roy’s fingertips gliding back along his jaw, flirting with his ears, and delving themselves into the soft hairs at the edge of his hairline that silences him, but if that hadn’t done the job, Roy’s mouth would have anyway.

Thoroughly.

And well.

Ed would rather breakdance on hot coals than admit it, but he’s fantasized about this more than once before. There might possibly have been a period where the whirlwind of adolescent hormones and the hopeless crush had formed a terrible alliance, and he had tended to fantasize about it more than once a _day_.

He had not, of course, at any point, had a great deal of data to base his fantasies upon—or, y’know, _any_ —but this is…

Wet. Warm. Thrillingly imminent; staggeringly intimate; utterly and excruciatingly _real_.

It’s not the first time that Ed’s ever kissed anyone at all, but the one with Ling was swift and surreptitious and felt so much like an accident that he almost couldn’t ever quite be sure that it had happened. He’d thought that they were just saying their goodbyes like normal people, and then all of a sudden he’d had Ling’s mouth on his mouth, and that would have been a supremely weird experience even if it wasn’t for the giant chaos-muddle of emotions involved. Ling had later sent him a letter that smelled like sandalwood and included a lightly encoded gushing apology, and Ed wrote back uncoded and told him to get his head out of his ass because it wasn’t a big deal, and things had mostly gone back to… well, not _normal_ , obviously, but standard, at least.

This, though—

This is not an accident. There is not a single thing about this that feels unintentional. There is not a single thing about this that rings of an apology.

What it is, instead, is fucking _glorious_.

Roy’s mouth on his is a physical sensation—an application of pressure, gentle but firm enough to be undeniable. It’s skin against skin. There is nothing mystical about that.

And yet—

And _yet_ —

Ed’s guts twist, and his blood heats, and his heartbeat sends the searing rush of it seething through his veins; his spine tightens, and his chest warms, and his head spins; and his toes push him upward without his permission, because every last inch of him wants _more_.

If Ed had known that Roy could be this damn good with that damn mouth, he would’ve shut him up like this years ago.

Repeatedly.

For now, though, this’ll definitely do.

But he should be careful—he shouldn’t let himself fall in any deeper; shouldn’t let himself sigh and breathe Roy’s air back in; shouldn’t let himself lean close and curl his fingers into Roy’s shirtfront and _want_.

He knows what happens to people who do things like that. He knows what the taste of Roy’s mouth drives people to.

Too late.

Roy’s fingers cup the base of his skull, twist gently into his hair, graze down the back of his neck to make him shiver all over again—

And Roy’s mouth on his, Roy’s tongue on his, Roy’s eyelashes against his skin and nose against his cheek and teeth against his lip make his blood quicken and simmer and sing.

He doesn’t have the slightest idea how much time passes; he’s gasping for breath because of the sheer quantity and immensity and intensity of the sensations, rather than because he’s forgotten how to inhale for some extended period. At least—he thinks so. Maybe. Possibly? Could be both.

When Roy shifts incrementally backwards, Ed’s whole body tenses like a myoclonic twitch—and maybe it is, thinking about it. Maybe he’s been dreaming, in all the ways that count.

He extracts his fingers from Roy’s shirt. Seeing is a struggle for a slightly alarming number of successive seconds; everything’s blurry at the start, and his heartbeat skitters, and then…

And then Roy comes into focus, searching Ed’s face like there’s a treasure map branded underneath his skin. “Was that—all right?”

“Are you serious?” Ed manages to croak out after another second or two of trying to get the gears to turn. “Are you fishing for compliments, or what?”

“It is a momentous occasion,” Roy says, starting to grin at him, lifting a hand again to smooth his hair back; “when I can truthfully say, perhaps for the first time in my life, that I am not.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Ed says.

“None of that, either,” Roy says. “Quite a lot of firsts tonight.”

Ed feels himself flushing and knows damned well that he can’t stop it. “Well—shut up. It was—great. Obviously. Shut up.”

Roy smiles at him in contentment for long enough that Ed has no choice but to eye him suspiciously. Roy’s response to that is to raise a hand again and tuck a little bit more of Ed’s hair behind his ear.

“Shit,” Ed says. “Are you _listening_ to me all of a sudden?”

“I know,” Roy says. “Another first. I figured we should keep the streak going.”

“You’re such a fucking dweeb,” Ed says, but it doesn’t come out anywhere near as accusatory as he meant it to. Someone who didn’t know better might even think it sounded fond.

  


* * *

  


“Forgive me,” Roy says as they make their way back to the car, while Ed tries to calculate how much work it would be to rupture the time-space continuum in a way that would prevent them from ever reaching it, so that this night won’t end. “May I…?”

Ed has been trying to slow their walking pace gradually enough that Roy won’t really notice ever since they left the streetlamp, so he practically comes to a standstill this time. “What?”

Roy holds his hand out.

Ed stares at it. Today has been strange, and his brain isn’t exactly wired properly to begin with, and for several very lengthy seconds, he thinks that maybe Roy’s asking for that borrowed money back.

Then he realizes that Roy— _General Roy Mustang_ —is too fucking shy to ask in so many words to hold his hand.

Ed’s face ignites. The language centers in his brain shut down all over again. “I—um. I—”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says, and for a split-second he looks like a kicked puppy before he reaffixes the impregnably neutral facial expression and starts to withdraw his hand. “Never m—”

“Like fuck, ‘never mind’,” Ed says, grabbing for it. He almost misses because his isn’t particularly steady. Roy offered the right one for his left. “Give me that. No take-backs.”

“Ah,” Roy says. He curls his fingers around Ed’s, then wriggles them until Ed releases the instinctive death grip enough for them to knit their fingers together, and that _shouldn’t_ feel phenomenal. How fucking stupid. Ed loves it, hates that he loves it, and hates that his heart scrabbles up into the back of his throat. “A rational policy to live by.”

“It is, though,” Ed says. He is holding Roy’s hand. He is walking through the park after a moderately- to mostly-successful date, depending on who you ask, and he is _holding Roy’s hand_. His twelve-year-old self would throw a chair through a window and then cry. “If you approach every situation with the knowledge that you can’t undo anything, you always have to give it the best you’ve got. Cuts down on the regrets.”

Roy’s giving him that awful gooey-eyed smile again. Gross. _Gross_.

Not gross enough to let go of his hand over, though. There are distinct categories when it comes to this sort of thing.

“Do you know what time it is?” Roy asks.

“No,” Ed says. His heart, which is still banging around in his esophagus somewhere, suddenly feels like it’s made of spikes. He’s turning into a sea urchin from the inside out. This sounds like a medical emergency if he’s ever heard one. “Why? You got someplace else you want to be?”

“Certainly not,” Roy says, in the same tone that he said all the shit last night that had to be true. “It’s just that I know that there’s a nice bakery down at the bottom of the hill here—” He gestures with their joined hands, and that feels weird and wonderful and nauseatingly sweet. “—and I was hoping that they might still be open. I’d like to get something for Alphonse before we go.”

It’s probably well past time for Ed to admit that he’s straight-up fucked.

  


* * *

  


“Hey, Brother!” Al says the instant that Ed opens the door. By the sound of it, if there wasn’t a cast and crutches and a significant amount of potential pain in the way, Al would probably be up off of the couch and bouncing around the room. “You look like you had a great time!”

Ed tries to grimace extra intimidatingly. It never works, but he lives in hope. “That’s not a thing that a person can look like, Al.”

“Sure it is,” Al says. “You started blushing as soon as I said it, and you didn’t slam the door.”

“ _Whatever_ ,” Ed says, trying to sound as dejected as possible just to be contrary. “Here. This is from Roy. He said it’s a thank-you for your help conscripting me into a date on the phone earlier.”

Al’s face crumples up in adorable confusion, but he takes the little pink box and opens it.

He spends several seconds staring in silence at what’s inside—which is a rather large, extremely appetizing sugar cookie made in the shape of a cat’s face, complete with iced on fur and whiskers and eyes with tiny eyelashes.

“Brother,” Al says, “keep him.”

Ed stops with his right-foot toes jammed into the back of his left boot to try to wedge it off. “Al—what the fuck?”

“You heard me,” Al says.

“Unfortunately,” Ed says. “You don’t even know if it tastes good.”

It will, though. At Roy’s insistence, Ed tried a cupcake before they left. The only thing better than the pastry was Roy wiping frosting off of Ed’s face with a fingertip and looking at him like he’d hung the goddamn stars.

“I do know,” Al says, “that you’ve waited several years to get to this point, and it would be a tremendous waste of effort to give up now.”

“Well,” Ed says, finally besting his stupid shoes, “I guess it’s a good thing I’m not planning on it, then.”

Al makes a terrible, tragic, ungodly squeak noise. It’s precious.

“Does that mean there’s a second date?” he asks. “Tell me there’s a second date.”

“No comment,” Ed says, nudging his shoes up against the wall and starting for the kitchen to get some cold water in the hopes of reducing the burning sensation all over his stupid face.

“I’m so proud of you,” Al calls after him.

“Shut up,” Ed says.

“You’ve been dreaming of this since you were, like, eleven years old,” Al says. “And now it’s _real_. You’re an inspiration. I’m so happy for you. And he got me a _cookie_.”

Ed finds a glass and just fills it from the tap. It can’t wait for ice. This’ll have to be cold enough. He gulps down a couple sips in rapid succession.

“So,” Al says. “When are you guys gonna fuck?”

At least the giant fountain of liquid that Ed sprays all over the entirety of their kitchen is mostly just water, even if there’s a little bit of spit.

“Oops,” Al says.


End file.
